e green fairy-knowe, all delight in "Kilmeny" and "Mary
Lee," and in many another vision that visited the Shepherd in the
Forest.

And what can surpass many of the Shepherd's songs? The most undefinable
of all undefinable kinds of poetical inspiration are surely--Songs. They
seem to start up indeed from the dew-sprinkled soil of a poet's soul,
like flowers; the first stanza being root, the second leaf, the third
bud, and all the rest blossom, till the song is like a stalk laden with
its own beauty, and laying itself down in languid delight on the soft
bed of moss--song and flower alike having the same "dying fall!"

A fragment! And the more piteous because a fragment. Go in search of the
pathetic, and you will find it tear-steeped, sigh-breathed,
moan-muttered, and groaned in fragments. The poet seems often struck
dumb by woe--his heart feels that suffering is at its acme--and that he
should break off and away from a sight too sad to be longer looked
on--haply too humiliating to be disclosed. So, too, it sometimes is with
the beautiful. The soul in its delight seeks to escape from the emotion
that oppresses it--is speechless--and the song falls mute. Such is
frequently the character--and the origin of that character--of our auld
Scottish Sangs. In their mournfulness are they not almost like the wail
of some bird distracted on the bush from which its nest has been
harried, and then suddenly flying away for ever into the woods? In their
joyfulness, are they not almost like the hymn of some bird, that
love-stricken suddenly darts from the tree-top down to the caresses that
flutter through the spring? And such, too, are often the airs to which
those dear auld sangs are sung. From excess of feeling--fragmentary; or
of one divine part to which genius may be defied to conceive another,
because but one hour in all time could have given it birth.

You may call this pure nonsense--but 'tis so pure that you need not fear
to swallow it. All great song-writers, nevertheless, have been great
thieves. Those who had the blessed fate to flourish first--to be born
when "this auld cloak was new,"--the cloak we mean which nature
wears--scrupled not to creep upon her as she lay asleep beneath the
shadow of some single tree among

"The grace of forest woods decay'd,
And pastoral melancholy,"

and to steal the very pearls out of her hair--out of the silken snood
which enamoured Pan himself had not untied in the Golden Age. Or if