True, O bard of Olney! But true too it is, that God made the country poet, and man only the town. The anointing, at least, of the former is of a purer and richer kind. And all greatest poets, accordingly, have been more or less rural. How did Homer love this green earth, and that ever sounding sea! And what a host of glad or terrible images has he culled from woody Ida, reedy Simois, Scamander's roaring waves, and the scenery of that Chian strand, whereon standing, he saw "The Iliad and the Odyssee Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea." And how numerous the descriptions of nature which abound in the Greek tragedians; in Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion; in Lucretius, who loved the rounded wholes as well as the sifted atoms of the universe; in Virgil, whose "Georgics," next to the "Seasons," is the finest commentary genius has ever written upon nature; in Dante, who was haunted by images of "trim gardens" and golden fruitage, all down the descending circles of the Inferno; in Shakspeare, who created the forest of Arden, and the island of Prospero, and dreamed the "Midsummer Night's Dream;" in Milton, the Milton of" Paradise" and "Comus;" in Spenser, who "lays us in the lap of a lovelier nature, by stiller streams, and fairer meadows;" in Bunyan, whose little bits of scenery, from that "very solitary place, the Valley of Humiliation," and the green meadow called Ease, up to the high platform of Mount Clear, and the precipices of Mount Danger, and the table-land of Beulah, are done in the finest style of simple pastoral painting; in Dryden, even, and Pope, who are masters in describing, the one the plain bold majesty of English landscapes, the pomp of avenues, the sweep of tree-surrounded parks, the other, all artificial glooms, which man can, in grove and grotto, and monastic aisle, and concealed cascade, create in mimicry of the mightier shadows by which nature girds in her solitudes; in Byron, who, like a demon-painter, pounces upon all congenial objects, the mountain-peak islanded in perpetual snow, the glacier asleep in its old path of ruin, all "hells of waters," the tormented river, the possessed cataract, the ocean in its hour of exorcism, "wallowing and foaming again," the "sun of the sleepless," or the blind staggering scenery of a darkened universe; and in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Wilson, Southey, Keats, &c., who aim at catching, not the external face, nor the pervading expression merely, but the inmost soul, the subtlest meaning of nature's solemn countenance. But there is a class of poets who have come still more closely in contact with nature; who may be called naked, native men, newly dug out, and panting with the first strong throbbings of God-given existence. Such are Burns, Bloomfield, Clare, Hogg, and Cunningham. These all fall spontaneously into one bright cluster, which we may call the Constellation of the Plough. They are all, in current phrase, self-educated, though verily we like not the phrase. Either all men are self-educated or none. We incline to the latter alternative. A poor weakling were one who, in the strict sense, could be called a self-educated man. To educate any man it takes a universe; for what is any man but the complex result or focus of ten thousand lines of education, coming in from the extremities of the creation to meet in him? the men of whom we speak not self, but heaven-taught men, and you approximate the truth. Such an one stepping forth into consciousness, finds himself in an illustrious academy, and his head schoolmaster is the sun. Subordinate teachers he has not a few, in the "silent stars," the whispering breezes, the waving trees, the sparkling waters, and the voices within Call his own soul, which respond to these in pre-established harmony. And thus does his education go on briskly with the revolving seasons, till his overflowing thoughts "voluntarily move harmonious numbers ;" and because he cannot speak, he sings his emotions. Speak!-he cannot speak; but neither can a nightingale. Like her he pours out the modulations of rude and artless melody :— "He lisps in numbers, for the numbers come." We select as specimens of this class James Hogg and Allan Cunningham. And first, for the Ettrick Shepherd. Had he not been a shepherd he had never been the peculiar poet he was he would never have passed by acclamation into the post of poet-laureate to the "Fairy Queen," with gallons of dew, collected into the cool basins of the rocks, instead of butts of sack-had he not innumerable times seen their misty scarfs exchanged by the morning hills for the sunny mantles of dawn, and a hundred streams surprised into glory by the fresh upland day-had he not a thousand times watched alone, and with kindling eye, the old struggle of the sun and the mist, ever renewed, never ending, on the hill—had he not slept all night in his plaid amid the coves of Ben-macdhui, and heard in half dream the sough of the "spirit of the storm"-had he not shouted on its top, in the triumphant intuition that he stood on the highest land in Britain-had he not seen six times double at its base, magnifying Loch Avon from two miles to twenty-four in length (an assertion which he persisted in to the last)-had he not revelled with the fairies in the green moonlight, and met with ghosts past reckoning, and seen his own image, mist-magnified and bowing to him from an opposite mountain, and slid down on ice from the top to the bottom of the huge Benmore, and thrust his arm into the solid snow of a storm tumbling down en masse from the blackest of heavens-had he not, in short, been born and bred, nursed and dandled in the arms of sublime superstition, and in the cradle of the forest, he had never been any more than a shrewd gossip, or the vain and vulgar burgess of a country town. But for the accidental circumstances and scenery of his birth, the one wild vein given him would never have bled. Off the green sward or the heather, for in both he was at home, though most on the former-out of the mist and the spray of the linn—he was the very commonest of men. The Grey Mare's Tail was the lock of his strength, the maud his mantle of inspiration. To talk of Sir Walter Scott being strong only on the heather is absurd; he was equally powerful on the turf of Sherwood Forest, amid the lilies of France, and on the sands of Syria. But Hogg could not transplant: the mountain air was the very necessity of his intellectual life, and the mystic ring of superstition the limit of his power. Out of this dread circle he resembled, not the magician, but the magician's victim― weak, panting, powerless. No man has written such loads of dull insensate trash, No man was ever so careless of his reputation, or knew less wherein, not merely his great strength, but his poetic identity, lay; but no man, at the same time, could so easily and rapidly regain the position. where he was all-powerful. He had but to shut his eyesto touch his organ of wonder-to name the name diablerieto tap on the wall, whence the death-tick was coming thick and strong, for a ghost, and James Hogg was himself again. Call not this, after all, a narrow range-it was unmeasured as superstition-it included in its dark span the domain of Faery Land-the grave— "Hell, Hades, Heaven, the eternal How and Where, Had that He was emphatically a "minion of the moon." shadowy orb not existed, (discovered now to be, for all her shy and timid ways, little else than one great volcano, with enormous perforated craters in her, ready to bombard earth on the first opportunity, and in the mean time laughing in her green sleeves at the silly praises she has been receiving from immemorial scribblers as the "mild moon," the "mild Hecla!" the "pensive moon," the "pensive Vesuvius!" the "sweet moon," "sweet Mount Etna !") neither had the "Queen's Wake." Hogg writes with a moon-beam on the semi-transparent leaves of the forest trees. "Labour dire it is, and weary wo" to climb with his celestial wanderers in their pilgrimage to the sun. His genius is not supernal enough to climb to that old flame-to overleap his dazzling fence of rays-to rest on his round black ball-to look up to the arch of overhanging glory, shutting out from him the universeto enter his metropolis-to follow his march, "lingering not, hasting not," in the train of some vaster luminary—or to anticipate the results of that swift suction, by which he may yet draw all his subject worlds into his one whirlpool solitude; stripping himself of his own august retinue; rolling himself together, to be in his turn ingulfed in the stream of some distant vortex. Better, though still with a coarse pencil, does he depict that lonely traveller, that Cain-world, which, thrust out of his native sphere, dreaded of men and angels, pursues his hideous way, showering thin flame" through the solitudes of space. It was a stroke of genius transferring the conception of a wandering Jew to the heavens, though the description of his progress, "clattering down the steeps of night for ever," reminds us, in its grotesque familiarity, of the worst style of Blair and Pollok. It is curious, however, that though so elegant and refined in almost all his pictures of the supernatural on earth, he is so coarse and |