We should count this, and justly, rather over-fine writing nowadays. Yet it is throughout stamped with the peculiarities of Christopher North; he cannot help his delightfully wanton play with language and sentiment; and into whatever sea of topics he plunged--early or late in life--he always came up glittering with the beads and sparkles of a highly charged rhetoric. Close after Oxford comes that idyllic life[14] in Windermere to which I have referred. Four or more years pass there; his trees grow there; his new roads--hewn through the forests--wind there; he plots a new house there; he climbs the mountains; he is busy with his boats. Somewhat later he marries; he does not lose his old love for the poets of the Greek anthology; he has children born to him; he breeds game fowls, and looks after them as closely as a New England farmer’s wife after her poultry; but with him poetry and poultry go together. There are old diaries of his--into which his daughter gives us a peep--that show such entries as this:--“The small Paisley hen set herself 6th of July, with no fewer than nine eggs;” and again--“Red pullet in Josie’s barn was set with eight eggs on Thursday;” and square against such memoranda, and in script as careful, will appear some bit of verse like this:-- “Oh, fairy child! what can I wish for thee? Like a perennial flowret may’st thou be, That spends its life in beauty and in bliss; Soft on thee fall the breath of time, And still retain in heavenly clime The bloom that charms in this.” He wrote, too, while living there above Windermere, his poem of the _Isle of Palms_; having a fair success in the early quarter of this century, but which was quickly put out of sight and hearing by the brisker, martial music of Scott, and by the later and more vigorous and resonant verse of Byron. Indeed, Wilson’s poetry was not such as we would have looked for from one who was a “varra bad un to lick” at a wrestling bout, and who made the splinters fly when his bludgeon went thwacking into a page of controversial prose. His verse is tender; it is graceful; it is delicate; it is full of languors too; and it is tiresome--a gentle girlish treble of sound it has, that you can hardly associate with this brawny mass of manhood. _Wilson in Scotland._