158 CHAPTER XVIII. MODERN PERIOD: JOHN LEYDEN. (1775-1811.) WE are now at the close of the eighteenth century and the opening of the nineteenth, and thus at the point where there was a new, freer, nobler vision of the grandeur of the earth. Now there began that consciousness of mountain grandeur in all its forms-mountain-tops in sunshine and in cloud; deep, arrestive, rugged glens; mountain torrents and cataracts; wide, wild, solitary moorlands; and all that daring aggressiveness against peak and apparently inaccessible height which have grown during the first half of this century, and which we now know in its fulness and its power. This means the overcoming of repugnance on the part of man to the sternest side of nature— his reconciliation to what was terrible and repulsive to him all through the ages. Macpherson's 'Ossian' alone did not accomplish this; it helped greatly. The cultured poets, except Thomson, did little for it. One power that worked in this direction has not been sufficiently appreciated, or indeed noticed at all. Among the many services to literature, poetry, and art, rendered by the recovery and publication, first by Percy and then by Scott, of the older minstrelsy of the district lying immediately north and south of the Cheviots, is the help afforded to the growth of the feeling for the sterner, grander side of nature. The old Ballad narratives tended directly and indirectly to make what to men hitherto had appeared simply powerful and terrible, an object of harmoniously toned and pleasurable æsthetical feeling. We might fairly enough say of the older Scottish poets-indeed the whole series of native poets and prose writers up to Percy's time, and even beyond-that their feeling for the sterner side of the Scottish landscape-for mountain, flood, forest, shadowed glen, and winter storm. was one of dread, even fear. Thomson, who went to England and in retrospect looked back on the Scottish landscape, overcame the feeling. But the poets dwelling in Scotland were permeated by it to the core. Exceptions, occasional glimpses, passing intuitions of something better there were, as we have noted in Drummond of Hawthornden and a few others; but these were extremely rare and passing. Now, in the Ballads of the Forest, which came from the heart of the people and went to the heart of ever succeeding generations, there were signs of a transition stage. The earlier dread was passing into something purer, higher, more soothing and æsthetic. There is the appearance of the rise and the growth of the purely contemplative feeling which accompanies the quiet self-satisfaction of imagination-simple delight in the grander side of things. The sterner aspect of the world was gradually ceasing to be terrible and repugnant. Even in a stanza of this sort there is an approach to the more purely imaginative feeling : "The King was comin' thro' Cadon Ford, And full five thousand men was he, They thought it awesome for to see." Awesome, - not a source of terror or dread, only that quiet arrestive feeling which subdues but does not repel or prostrate. The medieval spirit, indeed, regarded forestdepths as almost wholly repulsive, the haunts of darkness and danger, and probably full of secret entrances to regions of supernatural terrors. This spirit was now evidently dying in the minstrelsy of the Border Land, for the awesome is by no means synonymous with the terrible. Rather it is something intermediate between the emotions of dread and sublimity, being a marked feature, indeed the very heart, of the sublime. Then, those living in the forest came to know it familiarly, and to taste the joy of the free life which it afforded; and this gradually found utterance in song: "Ettrick Foreste is a feir foreste, In it grows many a semelie tree; There's hart and hind, and dae and rae, And of a' wild bestis grete plentie." It was through a loving study of these Ballads that Walter Scott got the incident and storythe sense even of the power and variety of VOL. II. L primary human emotion, which grew into such a glory of development in his poetry and prose. Their help to him was not less in serving to form that feeling of free, pure, abounding delight in the grander aspects of things, and the most striking manifestations of natural powers alike in Lowland and Highland scenery, which he was the first fully to express in Scottish poetry. But before Scott, the power of the old Ballad had been working on a son of the Teviot, both in the way of romantic incident and of the free feeling for nature. This was the author of the 'Scenes of Infancy.' John Leyden (1775-1811) was born in the village of Denholm, in Teviotdale, and spent his boyhood there almost under the shadow of Ruberslaw, and within sight of the crags of Minto. The incidents of his life are well known. After studying in the University of Edinburgh for the Church, he took to Medicine, qualified himself for a diploma in less than a year, went to Madras in April 1803, and after a short career of great and varied energy in India, he died of fever in Java in August 1811, at the early age of thirty-six. Leyden was an early |