n, and follow the pupil to the workshop, and the tavern,
and the fireside; even to the deathbed, such power is in the magic of
rhyme. The emigrant, deep in Australian forests, may take down
Chalmers's sermons on Sabbath evenings from the scanty shelf: but
the songs of Burns have been haunting his lips, and cheering his
heart, and moulding him, unconsciously to himself, in clearing and in
pasture all the weary week. True, if he be what a Scotchman should
be, more than one old Hebrew psalm has brought its message to him
during these week-days; but there are feelings of his nature on which
those psalms, not from defect, but from their very purpose, do not
touch: how is he to express them, but in the songs which echo them?
These will keep alive, and intensify in him, and in the children who
learn them from his lips, all which is like themselves. Is it, we
ask again, to be left to chance what sort of songs these shall be?

As for poetry written for the working classes by the upper, such
attempts at it as we yet have seen, may be considered nil. The upper
must learn to know more of the lower, and to make the lower know more
of them--a frankness of which we honestly believe they will never
have to repent. Moreover, they must read Burns a little more, and
cavaliers and Jacobites a little less. As it is, their efforts have
been as yet exactly in that direction which would most safely secure
the blessings of undisturbed obscurity. Whether "secular" or
"spiritual," they have thought proper to adopt a certain Tommy-good-
child tone, which, whether to Glasgow artisans or Dorsetshire
labourers, or indeed for any human being who is "grinding among the
iron facts of life," is, to say the least, nauseous; and the only use
of their poematicula has been to demonstrate practically the
existence of a great and fearful gulf between those who have, and
those who have not, in thought as well as in purse, which must be, in
the former article at least, bridged over as soon as possible, if we
are to remain one people much longer. The attempts at verse for
children are somewhat more successful--a certain little "Moral Songs"
especially, said to emanate from the Tractarian School, yet full of a
health, spirit, and wild sweetness, which makes its authoress, in our
eyes, "wiser than her teachers." But this is our way. We are too
apt to be afraid of the men, and take to the children as our pis-
aller, covering our despair of dealing with t