she
ventured, as sometimes she did, to walk along the highways of the earth,
they robbed her in the face of day of her dew-wrought reticule--without
hurting, however, the hand from which they brushed that net of gossamer.

Then came the Silver Age of Song, the age in which we now live--and the
song-singers were thieves still--stealing and robbing from them who had
stolen and robbed of old; yet, how account you for this phenomenon--all
parties remain richer than ever--and Nature, especially, after all this
thieving and robbery, and piracy and plunder, many million times richer
than the day on which she received her dowry,

"The bridal of the earth and sky;"

and with "golden store" sufficient in its scatterings to enable all the
sons of genius she will ever bear, to "set up for themselves" in poetry,
accumulating capital upon capital, till each is a Croesus, rejoicing
to lend it out without any other interest than cent per cent, paid in
sighs, smiles, and tears, and without any other security than the
promise of a quiet eye,

"That broods and sleeps on its own heart!"

Amongst the most famous thieves in our time have been Rob, James, and
Allan. Burns never saw or heard a jewel or tune of a thought or a
feeling, but he immediately made it his own--that is, stole it. He was
too honest a man to refrain from such thefts. The thoughts and
feelings--to whom by divine right did they belong? To Nature. But Burns
beheld them "waif and stray," and in peril of being lost for ever. He
seized then on those "snatches of old songs," wavering away into the
same oblivion that lies on the graves of the nameless bards who first
gave them being; and now, spiritually interfused with his own lays, they
are secured against decay--and like them immortal. So hath the Shepherd
stolen many of the Flowers of the Forest--whose beauty had breathed
there ever since Flodden's fatal overthrow; but they had been long
fading and pining away in the solitary places, wherein so many of their
kindred had utterly disappeared, and beneath the restoring light of his
genius their bloom and their balm were for ever renewed. But the thief
of all thieves is the Nithsdale and Galloway thief--called by Sir
Walter, most characteristically, "Honest Allan!" Thief and forger as he
is--we often wonder why he is permitted to live. Many is the sweet
stanza he has stolen from Time--that silly old carle who kens not even
his own--many the lifelike line--and many t