ored among the solitudes of nature, his
strong and vigorous imagination had received impressions from the
mountain, the cataract, the torrent, and the wilderness, and was filled
with pictures and images of the mysterious, which those scenes were
calculated to awaken. "Living for years in solitude," writes Professor
Wilson,[47] "he unconsciously formed friendships with the springs, the
brooks, the caves, the hills, and with all the more fleeting and
faithless pageantry of the sky, that to him came in place of those human
affections, from whose indulgence he was debarred by the necessities
that kept him aloof from the cottage fire, and up among the mists on the
mountain top. The still green beauty of the pastoral hills and vales
where he passed his youth, inspired him with ever-brooding visions of
fairy-land, till, as he lay musing in his lonely shieling, the world of
phantasy seemed, in the clear depths of his imagination, a lovelier
reflection of that of nature, like the hills and heavens more softly
shining in the water of his native lake." Hogg was in his element, as he
revelled amid the supernatural, and luxuriated in the realms of faery:
the mysterious gloom of superstition was lit up into brilliancy by the
potent wand of his enchantment, and before the splendour of his genius.
His ballad of "Kilmeny," in the "Queen's Wake," is the emanation of a
poetical mind evidently of the most gifted order; never did bard
conceive a finer fairy tale, or painter portray a picture of purer, or
more spiritual and exquisite sweetness. "The Witch of Fife," another
ballad in "The Wake," has scarcely a parallel in wild unearthliness and
terror; and we know not if sentiments more spiritual or sublime are to
be found in any poetry than in some passages of "The Pilgrims of the
Sun." His ballads, generally in his peculiar vein of the romantic and
supernatural, are all indicative of power; his songs are exquisitely
sweet and musical, and replete with pathos and pastoral dignity. Though
he had written only "When the kye comes hame," and "Flora Macdonald's
Lament," his claims to an honoured place in the temple of Scottish song
had been unquestioned. As a prose-writer, he does not stand high; many
of his tales are interesting in their details, but they are too
frequently disfigured by a rugged coarseness; yet his pastoral
experiences in the "Shepherd's Calendar" will continue to find readers
and admirers while a love for rural habits, and the a