Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it. Silent silver lights, and darks undreamed of, XX. O, their Rafael of the dear Madonnas, IN A SKYE BOTHY. BY ALEXANDER SMITH. AN is an ease-loving animal, with a lingering affec MAN tion for Arcadian dales; under the shadow of whose trees shepherd boys are piping" as they would never grow old." Human nature is a vagabond still, maugre the six thousand years of it, and amuses itself with dreams of societies free and unrestrained. It is this vagabond feeling in the blood which draws one so strongly to Shakespeare. That sweet and liberal nature of his blossomed into all wild human generosities. "As You Like It" is a vagabond play; and, verily, if there waved in any wind that blows upon the earth a forest, peopled as Arden's was in Shakespeare's imagination, with an exiled king drawing the sweetest, humanest lessons from misfortune, a melancholy Jaques stretched by the river's brink, moralizing on the bleeding deer, a fair Rosalind chanting her saucy cuckoo song, fools like Touchstone (not like those of our acquaintance, reader), and the whole place from centre to circumference filled with mighty oak-bolls, all carven with lovers' names; I would, be my worldly prospects what they may, pack up at once and join that vagabond company. For there I should find more gallant courtesies, finer sentiments, completer innocence and happiness, than I am like to discover here, although I search for them from shepherd's cot to king's palace. Just to think how these people lived Carelessly as the blossoming trees, happily as the singing birds; time measured only by the acorn's patter on the fruitful soil. A world without debtor or creditor; passing rich, yet with never a doit in its purse; with no sordid cares, no regard for appearances; nothing to occupy the young but love-making; nothing to occupy the old but listening to the "sermons in stones," and perusing the musical wisdom which dwells in "running brooks." Arden forest, alas! is not rooted in the carth: it draws sustenance from a poet's brain; and the light asleep on its leafy billows is that "that yet never was seen on sea or shore." But one cannot help dreaming of such a place, and striving to approach as nearly as possible to its sweet conditions. I am quite alone here: England may have been invaded and London sacked for aught I know. Several weeks since, a newspaper, accidentally blown to my solitude, informed me that the Great Eastern had been got under weigh, and was then swinging at the Nore. There is great joy, I perceive. Human nature stands astonished at itself; felicitates itself on its remarkable talent, and will for months to come purr complacently over its achievement in magazines and reviews. A fine world, messieurs, that will attain to heaven - if in the power of steam. A very fine world; yet for all that, I have withdrawn from it for a time, and would rather not hear of its remarkable exploits. In my present mood I do not value them that coil of vapor on the brow of Blavin, which, as I gaze, smoulders into nothing in the fire of sunrise. Goethe, in his memorable book, "Truth and Poetry," informs his readers that in his youth he loved to shelter himself in the Scripture narratives, from the marching and counter-marching of armies, the cannonading, retreating, and fighting, that lay everywhere around him. He shut his eyes, as it were, and a whole war-convulsed Europe wheeled away into silence and distance, and in its place, lo! the patriarchs, with their tawny tents, their man-ser vants and maid-servants, and countless flocks in impercep tible procession whitening the Syrian plains. In this my green solitude, I appreciate the full sweetness of the passage. Everything here is silent as the Bible plains themselves. I am cut off from former scenes and associates as by the sullen Styx and the grim ferrying of Charon's boat. The noise of the world does not touch me. I live too fur inland to hear the thunder of the reef. To this place no. postman comes, no tax-gatherer. This region never heard the sound of the church-going bell. The land is pagan as when the yellow-haired Norseman landed a thousand years ago. I almost feel a pagan myself. Not using a notched stick, I have lost all count of time, and don't know Saturday from Sunday. Civilization is like a soldier's stock; it makes you carry your head a good deal higher, makes the angels weep a little more at your fantastic tricks, and half suffocates you the while. I have thrown it away, and breathe freely. My bed is the heather, my mirror the stream from the hills, my comb and brush the sea-breeze, my watch the sun, my theatre the sunset, and my evening service - not without a rude natural religion in it - watching the pinnacles of the hills of Cuchullin sharpening in intense purple against the pallid orange of the sky, or listening to the melancholy voices of the sea-birds and the tide; that over, I am asleep till touched by the earliest splendor of the dawn. I am, not without reason, hugely enamored of my vagabond existence. My bothy is situated on the shores of one of the lochs that intersect Skye. The coast is bare and rocky, hollowed into fantastic chambers: and when the tide is making, every cavern murmurs like a sea-shell. The land, from frequent rain green as emerald, rises into soft pastoral heights, and about a mile inland soars suddenly up into peaks' of bas tard marble, white as the cloud under which the lark sings at noon, bathed in rosy light at sunset. In front are the Cuchullin hills and the monstrous peak of Blavin; then the green Strath runs narrowing out to sea, and the Island of Rum, with a white cloud upon it, stretches like a gigantic shadow across the entrance of the loch, and completes the scene. Twice every twenty-four hours the Atlantic tide sets in upon hollowed shores; twice is the sea withdrawn, leaving spaces of green sand on which mermaids with golden combs might sleek alluring tresses; and black rocks, heaped with brown dulse and tangle, and lovely ocean blooms of purple and orange; and bare islets, —— marked at full of tide by a glimmer of pale-green amid the universal sparkle, — where most the sea-fowl love to congregate. To these islets, on favorable evenings, come the crows, and sit in sable parliament; business despatched, they start into air as at a gun, and stream away through the sunset to their roosting-place in the Armadale woods. The shore supplies for me the place of books and companions. Of course Blavin and Cuchullin hills are the chief attractions, and I never weary watching them. In the morning they wear a great white caftan of mist; but that lifts away before noon, and they stand with all their scars and passionate torrent-lines bare to the blue heavens; with perhaps a solitary shoulder for a moment gleaming wet to the sunlight. After a while a vapor begins to steam up from their abysses, gathering itself into strange shapes, knotting and twisting itself like smoke; while above, the terrible crests are now lost, now revealed, in a stream of flying rack. In an hour a wall of rain, gray as granite, opaque as iron, stands up from the sea to heaven. The loch is roughening before the wind, and the islets, black dots a second ago, are patches of roaring foam. You hear the fierce sound of its coming. The lashing tempest sweeps over you, and looking behind, up the long inland glen, you can see on |