and set in Scottish heavens; his
"deep-fermenting tempests are brewed in grim evening" Scottish skies;
Scottish is his thunder of cloud and cataract; his "vapours, and snows,
and storms" are Scottish; and, strange as the assertion would have
sounded in the ears of Samuel Johnson, Scottish are his woods, their
sugh, and their roar; nor less their stillness, more awful amidst the
vast multitude of steady stems, than when all the sullen pine-tops are
swinging to the hurricane. A dread love of his native land was in his
heart when he cried in the solitude--

"Hail, kindred glooms! congenial horrors, hail!"

The genius of HOME was national--and so, too, was the subject of his
justly famous Tragedy of "Douglas." He had studied the old Ballads;
their simplicities were sweet to him as wallflowers on ruins. On the
story of Gill Morice, who was an Earl's son, he founded the Tragedy,
which surely no Scottish eyes ever witnessed without tears. Are not
these most Scottish lines?--

"Ye woods and wilds, whose melancholy gloom
Accords with my soul's sadness!"

And these even more so,--

"Red came the river down, and loud and oft
The angry Spirit of the water shriek'd!"

The Scottish Tragedian in an evil hour crossed the Tweed, riding on
horseback all the way to London. His genius got Anglified, took a
consumption, and perished in the prime of life. But nearly half a
century afterwards, on seeing the Siddons in _Lady Randolph_, and
hearing her low, deep, wild, woe-begone voice exclaim, "My beautiful! my
brave!" "the aged harper's soul awoke," and his dim eyes were again
lighted up for a moment with the fires of genius--say rather for a
moment bedewed with the tears of sensibility re-awakened from decay and
dotage.

The genius of Beattie was national, and so was the subject of his
charming song--"The Minstrel." For what is its design? He tells us, to
trace the progress of a poetical genius born in a rude age, from the
first dawning of reason and fancy, till that period at which he may be
supposed capable of appearing in the world as a Scottish Minstrel; that
is, as an itinerant poet and musician--a character which, according to
the notions of our forefathers, was not only respectable, but sacred.

"There lived in Gothic days, as legends tell,
A shepherd swain, a man of low degree;
Whose sires perchance in Fairyland might dwell,
Sicilian groves and vales of Arcady;
But he, I ween, w