twitter of the wren is music as well as the lark's lyrical up-burst; the sigh of the reed shaken by the wind as well as the roaring of a league of pines. _HOME._ When of an autumn evening the train brought me into Edinburgh, the scales of familiarity having to some little extent fallen from my eyes, I thought I had never before seen it so beautiful. Its brilliancy was dazzling and fairy-like. It was like a city of Chinese lanterns. It was illuminated as if for a great victory, or the marriage of a king. Princes Street blazed with street lamps and gay shop-windows. The Old Town was a maze of twinkling lights. The Mound lifted up its starry coil. The North Bridge leaping the chasm, held lamps high in air. There were lights on the Calton Hill, lights on the crest of the Castle. The city was in a full blossom of lights--to wither by midnight, to be all dead ere dawn. And then to an ear accustomed to silence there arose on every side the potent hum of moving multitudes, more august in itself, infinitely more suggestive to the imagination than the noise of the Atlantic on the Skye shores. The sound with which I had been for some time familiar was the voice of many billows; the sound which was in my ears was the noise of men. And in driving home, too, I was conscious of a curious oppugnancy between the Skye life which I had for same time been leading, and the old Edinburgh life which had been dropped for a little, and which had now to be resumed. The two experiences met like sheets of metal, but they were still separate sheets--I could not solder them together and make them one. I knew that a very few days would do that for me; but it was odd to attempt by mental effort to unite the experiences and to discover how futile was all such effort. Coming back to Edinburgh was like taking up abode in a house to which one had been for a while a stranger, in which one knew all the rooms and all the articles of furniture in the rooms, but with whose knowledge there was mingled a feeling of strangeness. I had changed my clothes of habit, and for the moment I did not feel so much at ease in the strange Edinburgh, as the familiar Skye, suit. [Sidenote: Ossianic translations.]