The rural imagery is fresh and fair; not copied Cockney wise, from pictures in oil or water-colours--from mezzotintoes or line-engravings--but from the free open face of day, or the dim retiring face of eve, or the face, "black but comely," of night--by sunlight or moonlight, ever Nature. Sometimes he gives us--Studies. Small, sweet, sunny spots of still or dancing day-stream-gleam--grove-glow-- sky-glimpse--or cottage-roof, in the deep dell sending up its smoke to the high heavens. But usually Allan paints with a sweeping pencil. He lays down his landscapes, stretching wide and far, and fills them with woods and rivers, hills and mountains, flocks of sheep and herds of cattle; and of all sights in life and nature, none so dear to his eyes as the golden grain, ebbing like tide of sea before a close long line of glancing sickles; no sound so sweet as--rising up into the pure harvest-air, frost-touched though sunny--beneath the shade of hedgerow-tree, after their mid-day meal, the song of the jolly reapers. But are not his pictures sometimes too crowded? No. For there lies the power of the pen over the pencil. The pencil can do much, the pen everything; the Painter is imprisoned within a few feet of canvass, the Poet commands the horizon with an eye that circumnavigates the globe; even that glorious pageant, a painted Panorama, is circumscribed by bounds, over which imagination, feeling them all too narrow, is uneasy till she soars; but the Poet's Panorama is commensurate with the soul's desires, and may include the Universe. This Poem reads as if it had been written during the "dewy hour of prime." Allan must be an early riser. But, if not so now, some forty years ago he was up every morning with the lark, "Walking to labour by that cheerful song," away up the Nith, through the Dalswinton woods; or, for anything we know to the contrary, intersecting with stone-walls, that wanted not their scientific coping, the green pastures of Sanquhar. Now he is familiar with Chantrey's form-full statues; then, with the shapeless cairn on the moor, the rude headstone on the martyr's grave. And thus it is that the present has given him power over the past--that a certain grace and delicacy, inspired by the pursuits of his prime, blend with the creative dreams that are peopled with the lights and shadows of his youth--that the spirit of the old ballad breathes still in its strong simplicity through the composition of his "New Poem"--and that art is seen harmoniously blending there with nature.