It may be, after all, that we have only proved Age to be the strongest season of Imagination; and if so, we have proved all we wish, for we seek not to deny, but to vindicate. Knowledge is power to the poet as it is power to all men--and indeed without Art and Science what is Poetry? Without cultivation the faculty divine can have but imperfect vision. The inner eye is dependent on the outward eye long familiar with material objects--a finer sense, cognisant of spiritualities, but acquired by the soul from constant communion with shadows--innate the capacity, but awakened into power by gracious intercourse with Nature. Thus Milton _saw_--after he became blind. But know that Age is not made up of a multitude of years--though that be the vulgar reckoning--but of a multitude of experiences; and that a man at thirty, if good for much, must be old. How long he may continue in the prime of Age, God decrees; many men of the most magnificent minds--for example, Michael Angelo--have been all-glorious in power and majesty at fourscore and upwards; but one drop of water on the brain can at any hour make it barren as desert dust. So can great griefs. Yestreen we had rather a hard bout of it in the Tent--the Glenlivet was pithy--and our Tail sustained a total overthrow. They are snoring as if it still were midnight. And is it thus that we sportsmen spend our time on the Moors? Yet while "so many of our poorest subjects are yet asleep," let us re-point the nib of our pen, and in the eye of the sweet-breathed morning--moralise. Well-nigh quarter a century, we said, is over and gone since by the Linn of Dee we pitched--on that famous excursion--THE TENT. Then was the genesis of that white witch Maga-- "Like some tall Palm her noiseless fabric grew!" Nay, not noiseless--for the deafest wight that ever strove to hear with his mouth wide open, might have sworn that he heard the sound of ten thousand hammers. Neither grew she like a Palm--but like a Banyan-tree. Ever as she threw forth branches from her great unexhausted stem, they were borne down by the weight of their own beauty to the soil--the deep, black rich soil in which she grew, originally sown there by a bird of Paradise, that dropt the seed from her beak as she sailed along in the sunshiny ether--and every limberest spray there again taking root, reascended a stately scion, and so on ceaselessly through all the hours, each in itself a spring-season, till the figurative words of Milton have been fulfilled,-- --"Her arms Branching so broad and long, that in the ground The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow About the mother tree, a pillar'd shade High overarch'd, and echoing walks between; There oft the Ettrick Shepherd, shunning heat, Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds At loopholes cut through thickest shade."