steals down the gray of the hill, and there, by the way-side, is an ample well, with the "netted sunbeam" dancing in it. Those who know Tannahill's "Gloomy Winter's noo awa" must admire its curious felicity of touch and colour. Turn round, you are in the very scene of the song. [Sidenote: Gleniffer.] In front is "Gleniffer's dewy dell," to the east "Glenkelloch's sunny brae," afar the woods of Newton, over which at this moment laverocks fan the "snaw-white cluds;" below, the "burnie" leaps in sparkle and foam over many a rocky shelf, till its course is lost in that gorge of gloomy firs, and you can only hear the music of its joy. Which is the fairer--the landscape before your eyes, or the landscape sleeping in the light of song? You cannot tell, for they are at once different and the same. The touch of the poet was loving and true. His genius was like the light of early spring, clear from speck or stain of vapour, but with tremulousness and uncertainty in it; happy, but with grief lying quite close to its happiness; smiling, although the tears are hardly dry upon the cheeks that in a moment may be wet again. [Sidenote: Tannahill.] But who is Tannahill? the southern reader asks with some wonder; and in reply it may be said that Burns, like every great poet, had many imitators and successors, and that of these successors in the north country Hogg and Tannahill are the most important. Hogg was a shepherd in The Forest, and he possessed out of sight the larger nature, the greater intellectual force; while as master of the weird and the supernatural there is no Scottish poet to be put beside him. The soul of Ariel seems to inhabit him at times. He utters a strange music like the sighing of the night-wind; a sound that seems to live remote from human habitations. In openness to spiritual beauty, Burns, compared with him, was an ordinary ploughman. Like Thomas the Rhymer, he lay down to sleep on a green bank on a summer's day, and the Queen of Fancy visited his slumber; and never afterwards could he forget her beauty, and her voice, and the liquid jingling of her bridle bells. Tannahill was a weaver, who wrote songs, became crazed, and committed suicide before he reached middle life. His was a weak, tremulous nature. He was wretched by reason of over-sensitiveness. "He lived retired as noon-tide dew." He wanted Hogg's strength, self-assertion, humour, and rough sagacity; nor had he a touch of his weird strain. From Burns, again, he was as different as a man could possibly be. Tannahill knew nothing of the tremendous life-battle fought on wet Mossgiel farm, in fashionable Edinburgh, in provincial Dumfries. He knew nothing of the Love, Scorn, Despair,--those wild beasts that roamed the tropics of Burns's heart. But limited as was his genius, it was in its quality perhaps more exquisite than theirs. He was only a song-writer--both Burns and Hogg were more than that--and some of his songs are as nearly as possible perfect.