("The good must merit God's peculiar care,
But who but God can tell us who they are?
One thinks on Calvin, Heaven's own spirit fell,
Another deems him instrument of Hell.")
See! where the haggard Drunkard prostrate lies,
With bloated face, and dull, unmeaning eyes-
The semblance of a man without the mind,
A living corpse, a tree without the rind!
Fit retribution of the maddening bowl,
Which wastes and squanders energy of soul!
There creeps the Miser with his hoarded gain,
With shrivelled heart, and sharp but callous brain;
Sweet, blessed Charity he never knew,
The dove of Peace-to him she never flew !
Nor rooted Faith upon his Conscience grew;
Dark Calculation, with malignant gloom,
Hath made him cheerless as a darkened tomb;
Broad-faced Benevolence, whose moistened eye,
Could weep for all humanity, passed him by,
As the tall vessel shuns the dreaded rock-
With ocean toys, but fears earth's slightest shock-
The coral reef, laborious built and strong,
Is shunned by all, and deemed successful wrong:
So shall the Miser, rooted and alone,
Stand by himself, an adamantine stone-
And feel, too late, his dear-bought golden sway
Had worn by inches all his heart away;
Retired from business, when his wealth was won,
Found, to his horror, all his pleasures flown!
Petrified to rock his early tastes are turned,
As flowering plants by time are fossils formed;
No withered leaves the Spring can e'er revive,
Nor genial Summer make dead blossoms thrive:
Petrified at heart, he stands a fossil still-
A cold and lifeless stone against his will!
There let him stand, to warn us all in time-
A fitting monument to close this rhyme !
To prove to man that God is always kind,
That truest wealth is a contented mind;
And truest learning is from Nature taught,
As true Religion springs from silent thought-
Not proud formality, as if heaven were bought!
Sincerity is Man's celestial pole,
And far the truest needle of his soul!
A silent thought to God is loudest praise,
The truest worship which the soul can raise
To Thee, Omniscient and Eternal Mind,
And only worship which his soul can find.
Thy Word is Truth, whose freight is Love to Man,-
A noble argosy! whose mission is to scan
The world, and carry Justice round the globe,
Free as the wind, its sail the seamless robe
Of Christ, its spirit steered by enlightened Faith-
Not stone-blind Bigotry which makes God a myth.
In truth, "unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!"1
1 The last couplet is taken from Daniel.
And the prophet is right-it helps to explain, if not to testify, that the restless peering after Truth, and innate longing to know and satisfy the mysterious craving after Immortality, was implanted in the Soul of Man by God to rise superior to his poor, brief mortality! While Orthodoxy is just like the tail of the kite-the mere ballast, tied on by God to preserve the soul from flying off too soon in search of its own native sphere. Wordsworth beautifully likens the child, listening to the sound of the empty univalve, as having mysterious connection with the boom of the mighty living Ocean, from whence it sprung and grew.
"Opinion, ever changing !-I have seen
A curious child, which dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell;
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intensely and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy; for murmurings from within
Were heard, sonorous cadences! whereby
To his belief, the monitor expressed
Mysterious union with its native sea.
Even such a shell the Universe itself
Is to the ear of Faith; and there are times
I doubt not, when to you it doth impart
Authentic tidings of invisible things;
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power;
And central peace, subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation."
HE idea of the following rhyme was taken from my seeing the remnant of a once noble-looking grey horse galloping in a cadger's cart, with a very heavy load of fish, just in time to catch the Newport ferry steam-boat, which crosses the Tay to Dundee. The poor animal was all covered with sweat and foam, and bespattered with mud; it had been driven from Anstruther, a distance of upwards of twenty miles, evidently at a torturing speed. No sooner was it across the boat's gangway, than the cadger, a brutal-looking fellow, seized one of the rough brooms for sweeping the deck, and with this very coarse brush swept the mud and sweat off the belly and quivering limbs of the reeking and over-driven beast. But perhaps, as Dairsie Latimer said to Allan Fairford, in "Redgauntlet," "I am sure you will, as usual, turn the opposite side of the spy-glass on my poor narrative, and reduce more tuo, to the most petty trivialities, the circumstance to which thou accusest me of giving undue consequence."
"My master rade me to the town,
He tied me to a staincher round,
He took a chappin till himsel',
But feint a drap gae me.
The auld man's mare's dead,
The poor man's mare's dead,
The auld man's mare's dead
A mile aboon Dundee."
By PATIE BIRNIE, Fiddler of Kinghorn.
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