Far spires lifting over stretches of yellow grass-grown plain; marsh birds trailing their flight by sluggish rivers; boats dragged slumberously at noon-tide with seething bubbles in their wake; great banks of woodland, wading through snows, or throwing shadows by morning, and counter-shadows at evening, over the flanks of low hills on which they stand in leafy platoons. And for sounds--far off church-bells waking solitudes with their tremulous beat and jangle; birds chasing the echoes of their own songs; bees murmurous over banks of thyme; cattle lowing in the meadows; or the bay of some hound--breaking full and clear, and lost again--as he follows, far off, some cold trail amongst the hills. Above all--he is English; the household has for him the sanctity of an altar; firesides are lighted and glow with a sacred warmth; home interests are always golden. Prone to idleness he is perhaps--mental and physical; much femininity in him; his thought wavering and riding on his rhyme. But he is good, kind; crudest to himself--sticking the John Newton darts of Calvinism into his conscience, and loving the pain of them. {256} I think we must always respect the name and the work of William Cowper. In our next chapter we shall listen to the music of a different singer, and to the story of a jollier, and yet of a far sadder life. [1] As a matter of curiosity I give what appears to be the corresponding Gaelic in a couplet of lines, from the version in Rev. Archibald Clerk's Ossian:-- "A's gile na 'n cobhar,' tha sgavilte Air muir o ghaillinn nan sian." l. 75, Duan 1, Fionnghal. [2] James Macpherson: b. 1736; d. 1796. [3] Mr. Mackenzie (_Diss. lxxxvii., Edit. Highland Soc._, London, 1807) says that he (Macpherson) took some of his Gaelic MSS. to Florida with him and many were lost there. [4] Macpherson had translated and published the Iliad in 1773. It will interest my readers to know that a copy of this letter in Johnson's hand-writing, was sold in 1875 for £50--five times the sum which he received for the tale of Rasselas! [5] Sir John Sinclair, a voluminous agricultural writer of Scotland, was strenuous supporter of Macpherson's claims--respecting Ossianic origin, etc. The best exhibit, however, of the Gaelic side of the question may be found in the prefatory _Dissertation_ by Rev. Archibald Clerk, to the beautiful edition of Ossian published by Blackwood & Sons in 1870. [6] George Halket, a Jacobite schoolmaster, d. 1756; Alexander Ross, minister, b. 1699; d. 1784; John Skinner, Episcopal clergyman, b. 1721; d. 1807. [7] George Crabbe: b. 1754; d. 1832. _The Village_, _The Borough_, and _Tales of the Hall_, are his best-known works. _Life_, by his son (1834), is a very full and filially devout book of interesting reading. [8] So late as 1808, the Edinburgh Review, after speaking of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, etc., continues in language which I suppose is Jeffery's own:--