The English emigrant is prosaic; Highland and Irish emigrants are poetical. How is this? The wild-rose lanes of England, one would think, are as bitter to part from, and as worthy to be remembered at the antipodes, as the wild coasts of Skye or the green hills of Ireland. Oddly enough, poet and painter turn a cold shoulder on the English emigrant, while they expend infinite pathos on the emigrants from Erin or the Highlands. The Highlander has his Lochaber-no-more, and the Irishman has the Countess of Gifford's pretty song. The ship in the offing, and the parting of Highland emigrants on the sea-shore, has been made the subject of innumerable paintings; and yet there is a sufficient reason for it all. Young man and maid are continually parting; but unless the young man and maid are lovers, the farewell-taking has no attraction for the singer or the artist. Without the laceration of love, without some tumult of sorrowful emotion, a parting is the most prosaic thing in the world; with these it is perhaps the most affecting. "Good-bye" serves for the one; the most sorrowful words of the poet are hardly sufficient for the other. Rightly or wrongly, it is popularly understood that the English emigrant is not mightily moved by regret when he beholds the shores that gave him birth withdrawing themselves into the dimness of the far horizon,--although, if true, why it should be so? and if false, how it has crept into the common belief? are questions not easy to answer. If the Englishman is obtuse and indifferent in this respect, the Highlander is not. He has a cat-like love for locality. He finds it as difficult to part from the faces of the familiar hills as from the faces of his neighbours. In the land of his adoption he cherishes the language, the games, and the songs of his childhood; and he thinks with a continual sadness of the gray-green slopes of Lochaber, and the thousand leagues of dim, heart-breaking sea tossing between them and him.