When we came back to the house, and after taking coffee in the drawing room, Miss S. took me over the interior, a most delightful place, full of all sorts of out-of-the-way snuggeries, and comfortable corners, and poetic irregularities. There she showed me a picture of one of the early ancestors of the family, the poet Drummond, hanging in a room, which tradition has assigned to him. It represents a man with a dark, Spanish-looking face, with the broad Elizabethan ruff, earnest, melancholy eyes, and an air half cavalier, half poet, bringing to mind the chivalrous, graceful, fastidious bard, accomplished scholar, and courtier of his time, the devout believer in the divine right of kings, and of the immunities and privileges of the upper class generally. This Drummond, it seems, was early engaged to a fair young lady, whose death rendered his beautiful retreat of Hawthornden insupportable to him, and of course, like other persons of romance, he sought refuge in foreign travel, went abroad, and remained eight years. Afterwards he came back, married, and lived here for some time. Among other traditions of the place, it is said that Ben Jonson once walked all the way from London to visit the poet in this retreat; and a tree is still shown on the grounds under which they are said to have met. It seems that Ben's habits were rather too noisy and convivial to meet altogether the taste of his fastidious and aristocratic host; and so he had his own thoughts of him, which, being written down in a diary, were published by some indiscreet executor, after they were both dead. We were shown an old, original edition of the poems. I must confess I never read them. Since I have seen the material the poet and novelist has on this ground, all I wonder at is, that there have not been a thousand poets to one. I should have thought they would have been as plenty as the mavis and merle, and sprouting out every where, like the primroses and heather bells. Our American literature is unfortunate in this respect--that our nation never had any childhood, our day never had any dawn; so we have very little traditionary lore to work over.