choly Kilchurn? The lost child's parents died in their old age-but she, 'tis said, is unchanged in shape and features-the same fair thing she was the evening that she disappeared, only a shade of sadness is on her pale face, as if she were pining for the sound of human voices, and the gleam of the peat-fire of the shieling. Ever, when the Fairy-court is seen for a moment beneath the glimpses of the moon, she is sitting by the side of the gracious Queen. Words of might there are, that if whispered at right season, would yet recall her from the shadowy world, to which she has been spirited away; but small sentinels stand at their stations all round the isle, and at nearing of human breath, a shrill warning is given from sedge and water-lily, and like dewdrops melt away the phantoms, while, mixed with peals of little laughter, overhead is heard the winnowing of wings. For the hollow of the earth, and the hollow of the air, is their Invisible Kingdom; and when they touch the herbage or flowers of this earth of ours, whose lonely places they love, then only are they revealed to human eyes at all times else to our senses unexistent as dreams!

A DAY AT WINDERMERE.

OLD and gouty, we are confined to our chair; and occasionally, during an hour of rainless sunshine, are wheeled by female hands along the gravel-walks of our Policy, an unrepining and philosophical valetudinarian. Even the Crutch is laid up in ordinary, and is encircled with cobwebs. A monstrous spider has there set up his rest; and our still study ever and anon hearkens to the shrill buz of some poor fly expiring between those formidable forceps-just as so many human ephemerals have breathed their last beneath the bite of his indulgent master. 'Tis pleasure to look at Domitian-so we love to call him-sallying from the centre against a wearied wasp, lying, like a silkworm, circumvoluted in the inextricable toils, and then seizing the sinner by the nape of the neck, like Christopher with a Cockney, to see the emperor haul him away into the charnel-house. But we have often less savage recreations-such as watching our bee-hives when about to send forth colonies-feeding our pigeons, a purple people that dazzle the daylightgathering roses as they choke our small chariot-wheels with their golden orbs-eating grapes out of vine-leaf

draperied baskets, beautifying beneath the gentle fingers of the Gentle into fairy network graceful as the gossamer-drinking elder-flower frontiniac from invisible glasses, so transparent in its yellowness seems the liquid radiance—at one moment eyeing a page of Paradise Lost, and at another of Paradise Regained; for what else is the face of her who often visiteth our Eden, and whose coming and whose going is ever like a heavenly dream. Then laying back our head upon the cushion of our triumphal car, and with half-shut eyes, subsiding slowly into haunted sleep or slumber, with our fine features up to heaven, a saint-like image, such as Raphael loved to paint, or Flaxman to embue with the soul of stillness in the life-hushed marble. Such, dearest reader, are some of our pastimes-and so do we contrive to close our ears to the sound of the scythe of Saturn, ceaselessly sweeping over the earth, and leaving, at every stride of the mower, a swathe more rueful than ever, after a night of shipwreck did strew with ghastliness a lee sea-shore !

Thus do we make a virtue of necessity-and thus contentment wreathes with silk and velvet the prisoner's chains. Once were we-long, long ago-restless as a sunbeam on the restless wave-rapid as a river that seems enraged with all impediments, but all the while in passionate love

"Doth make sweet music with th' enamell'd stones"

strong as a steed let loose from Arab's tent in the oasis to slake his thirst at the desert well-fierce in our harmless joy as a red-deer belling on the hills-tameless as

the eagle sporting in the storm-gay as the "dolphin on a tropic sea”- "mad as young bulls"—and wild as a whole wilderness of adolescent lions. But now-alas! and alack-a-day! the sunbeam is but a patch of sober verdure—the river is changed into a canal-the "desertborn" is foundered-the red-deer is slow as an old ram -the eagle has forsook his cliff and his clouds, and hops among the gooseberry bushes-the dolphin has degenerated into a land tortoise-without danger now might a very child take the bull by the horns—and though something of a lion still, our roar is, like that of the nightingale," most musical, most melancholy”—and, as we attempt to shake our mane, your grandmother— fair peruser—cannot choose but weep.

It speaks folios in favour of our philanthropy, to know that, in our own imprisonment, we love to see all life free as air. Would that by a word of ours we could clothe all human shoulders with wings! Would that by a word of ours we could plume all human spirits with thoughts strong as the eagle's pinions, that they might winnow their way into the empyrean! Tories! Yes! we are Tories. Our faith is in the Divine right of kings but easy, my boys, easy-all free men are kings, and they hold their empire from heaven. That is our political-philosophical-moral-religious creed. In its spirit we have lived-and in its spirit we hope to die-not on the scaffold like Sidney-no-no-nonot by any manner of means like Sidney on the scaffold -but like ourselves, on a hair-mattress above a feather

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bed, our head decently sunk in three pillows and one bolster, and our frame stretched out unagitatedly beneath a white counterpane. But meanwhile-though almost as unlocomotive as the dead in body-there is perpetual motion in our minds. Sleep is one thing, and stagnation known to all eyes that have ever seen, by moonlight and midnight, the face of Christopher North, or of Windermere.

is another—as is well

Windermere ! Why, at this blessed moment we behold the beauty of all its intermingling isles. There they are-all gazing down on their own reflected loveliness in the magic mirror of the air-like water, just as many a holy time we have seen them all agaze, when, with suspended oar and suspended breath-no sound but a ripple on the Naiad's bow, and a beating at our own heart-motionless in our own motionless bark-we seemed to float midway down that beautiful abyss between the heaven above and the heaven below, on some strange terrestrial scene composed of trees and the shadows of trees, by the imagination made indistinguishable to the eye, and as delight deepened into dreams, all lost at last, clouds, groves, water, air, sky, in their various and profound confusion of supernatural peace. But a sea-born breeze is on Bowness Bay; all at once the lake is blue as the sky and that evanescent world is felt to have been but a vision. Like swans that had been asleep in the airless sunshine, lo! where from every shady nook appear the white-sailed pinnaces ; for on merry Windermere-you must know-every breezy hour has its own Regatta.

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