actuality of existence, and of original character. This too was eminently his. His Border Minstrelsy published, he turned his views northward, and a still more stirring scene presented itself. The Highlands, with their beautiful mountains and lakes, their clan life, their thrilling traditions and stories of but recently past conflicts, bloodshed, and sorrow;--their striking costume, their pipers blowing strains that, amid the rocks, and forests, and dark heather of that romantic region, kindled even in the heart of the stranger a strange enthusiasm,--all was to him full of the fire of poetry, and of a romance too large, with all its quick and passionate characters, and its vivid details, for poetry itself. First came forth his Metrical Romances--themselves a new and inspiriting species of poetry, founded, indeed, on an old basis, but quickened with the soul of modern knowledge, and handled with the harmonious freedom of a modern master. These, however, now we may regard them as somewhat overstepped by the more impassioned lays of Byron, and by the more expansive wonders of the author's own prose romances, were, at the time, an actual infusion of new life-blood into the public. They were the opening up of a totally new world, fresh and beautiful as the imagination could conceive. They actually seemed to smell of the heather. Every rock, hung with its dark pines, or graceful birches; every romantic lake, bosomed in its lonely mountains; the hunt careering along its richly colored glens; the warrior, full of a martial and chivalrous spirit; the lithe Highlander, with dirk and philibeg, crouching in the heath, like the Indian in his forest, or speeding from clan to clan with the fiery cross of war,--every one of these vivid images was as new to the English public as if they had been brought from the farthest regions of Japan. Then the whole of these newly discovered regions, the Highlands, for such they were, was covered with traditions of strangest exploits; the people were a wild, irritable, vengeful, but still high-minded people, exhibiting the equally prominent virtues and crimes of a demi-civilized race. How refreshing was the contemplation of such scenes and people to the jaded minds of the English, so long doomed to mediocre monotony! I well remember, then a youth, with what avidity a new poem of Walter Scott's was awaited for and devoured. It was a poetry welcome to all, because it had not merely the qualities of good poetry, which would have been lost on the majority of readers, but it had all this novelty of scenery and character, and the excitement of brilliant story, to recommend it. Then it was perpetually shifting its ground. It was now amid the lonely regions of the south of Scotland; now high up amid heaths, and lochs, and pine-hung mountains, the shepherd's sheiling, the roar of the cataract, and the cry of the eagle, mixing with the wild sound of the distant pibroch; and now amid the green, naked mountains and islands