To aching eyes each landscape lowers, To feverish pulse each gale blows chill; And Araby's or Eden's bowers Were barren as this moorland hill. MY VATIVE LAND. BREATHES there a man with soul so dead Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned, As home his footsteps he hath turned, From wandering on a foreign strand! If such there breathe, go, mark him well; For him no Minstrel raptures swell; High though his titles, proud his name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim; Despite those titles, power and pelf, The wretch concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down. To the vile dust, from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonored, and unsung! JAMES HOGG. 1773-1835. JAMES HOGG was born in a sphere perhaps still more remote than that of Burns from the possibility of attaining the dignity of a popular and national poet. Born the descendant of an ancestry of shepherds in the wilds of Ettrick, his seventh year opened amidst the ruins of his father's small and painfully-acquired means. A rude shieling was the dwelling of his childhood; some six months "buckled in the sum" of his school education; till nearly his manhood the Bible was his only reading; but the sunshine of the poetical fancy seems early to have flitted about his mind. To his mother, like many great men, he owed the nursing of the talent which God had given. Literature slowly shed her showers on his intellect; and, after a youth passed in sequestered regions in the care of a few sheep, he appeared before his countrymen as a claimant of the successorship to the throne of Burns. The first wealth his pen yielded was expended on an unlucky farming speculation. Driven to Edinburgh and to literature as a means of subsistence, the publication of the "Queen's Wake" in 1813 at length vindicated his position as a poet. In that year, a grant of the farm of Altrive in Ettrick, from his patron the Duke of Buccleuch, restored him to his original occupation. He married; leased the larger adjoining farm of Mount Benger, the failure of which again reduced him in a few years to poverty. During these years he continued to write voluminously; he was intimately connected for a considerable time with Blackwood's Magazine; he claims, indeed, the merit of founding that periodical. His poetry consists chiefly of songs, ballads, and elfin legends; he was at home in the fairy world, and it is in these gorgeous and airy regions in which his genius is chiefly conspicuous. THE SKY-LARK. BIRD of the wilderness, Blythsome and cumberless, Sweet be thy matin o'er moorland and lea! Emblem of happiness, Blest is thy dwelling-place— O to abide in the desert with thee! Wild is thy lay and loud Far in the downy cloud, Love gives it energy, love gave it birth. Where, on thy dewy wing, Where art thou journeying? Thy lay is in heaven, thy love is on earth. O'er fell and fountain sheen, O'er moor and mountain green, O'er the red streamer that heralds the day, Over the cloudlet dim, Over the rainbow's rim, Musical cherub, soar, singing, away! Then, when the gloaming comes, Low in the heather blooms Sweet will thy welcome and bed of love be! Emblem of happiness, Blest is thy dwelling-place O to abide in the desert with thee! ADDRESS TO JEHO V AF. BLESSED be thy name forever, Thou of life the guard and giver; Heal the heart long broke with weeping. God of stillness and of motion, Of the desert and the ocean, Of the mountain, rock, and river, Thou who slumberest not, nor sleepest, Of midnight's gloom, and dawning day, That rises from the azure sea, Like breathings of eternity; God of life! that fade shall never, Blessed be thy name forever! |