hur more.

* * * * *

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me;
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then have I reason to be fond of grief.

* * * * *

O lord, my boy, my Arthur, my fair son!
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!
My widow-comfort and my sorrow's cure.'

This is the impassioned but simple eloquence of Nature, and Nature's
child: Shakspeare.

In these examples the reader will not fail to remark that the
Imagination seems to gain much of its power from its love for and
sympathy with the objects described. Not only are the objects with which
it presents us _truthfully_ rendered, but always _lovingly_ treated.

With the Greeks, the Graces were also the _Charities_ or _Loves_. It is
the love for living things and the sympathy felt in them that induce the
poet to give life and feeling to the plant, as Shelley to the 'Sensitive
Plant;' as Shakspeare, when he speaks to us through the sweet voices of
Ophelia and Perdita; as Wordsworth, in his poems to the Daisy, Daffodil,
and Celandine; as Burns in his Mountain Daisy. As a proof of the power
of the Imagination, through its _Truth,_ and _Love_, to invest the
lowest of God's creatures with interest, we offer the reader one of
these simple songs of the heart.

TO A MOUSE.

_On turning her up in her nest with the plough,
November, 1785._

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hastie,
Wi' bickering brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor earth-born companion
An' fellow mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icher in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin' wi' the lave
An' never miss't!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'!
An' naething, now, to big anew ane,
O' foppage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin',