the deepest and tenderest emotions of which it is
capable. Here, if anywhere, we find the Helicon of Scotland.

We may regret, with R. L. Stevenson, that the names of the old balladists
have disappeared from the roll of fame. It would have been interesting to
know who the singers were; but we may be thankful that the songs they sung
have come down to our later age. They are a priceless inheritance, a
glorious legacy. In these ballads the rugged cactus of Border life has
burst into the most gorgeous blossom.

But this is not all. The ballad period, rich as it is in all the higher
elements of dramatic and poetic suggestiveness, was but the beginning of
an era of song, which has secured for the Borderland an unique
distinction. In the beginning of the eighteenth century there was born in
the manse of Ednam, in the neighbourhood of Kelso, one of the most
renowned of Border poets, James Thomson, the author of "The Seasons," "The
Castle of Indolence," "Rule Britannia," and other pieces. His early youth
was spent in the parish of Southdean, and here among the green rolling
hills, and by the quiet streams, he stored his mind and imagination with
those images of natural beauty which in later times, in a far-off city, he
embodied in immortal verse. His services to the poetic literature of his
age and country have been tardily, and often very inadequately,
appreciated. To him mainly belongs the credit of bringing the minds of men
back to nature and reality as the only genuine sources of poetic
inspiration. He was the forerunner of Cowper, and Burns, and
Wordsworth--the pioneer in a new and profoundly significant movement.

After a considerable interval, Scott, Hogg, and Leyden appear on the
scene--names that will for ever remain enshrined in Border song and story.
Scott was a Borderer of Borderers, a descendant of Auld Wat of Harden and
Mary Scott, the Flower of Yarrow. His grandfather, on the maternal side,
was Professor Rutherford, a famous man in his day, the scion of an old
Border stock, renowned, like the Harden family, in the annals of reiving.

Hogg and Leyden occupy a place of honourable distinction in the life and
literature of the Borders. "Kilmeny" is a masterpiece of imaginative
genius, and has won for its author a fame which the lapse of time will not
seriously impair. John Leyden, more renowned as a scholar and antiquary
than a poet, gave evidence of the possession of powers which, had he been
spared, would have s