Oft, oft have ye leaped when your children of battle, With war-bearing footsteps rushed down your dark crests; Oft, oft have ye thundered with far-rolling rattle, The echoes of slogans that burst from their breasts:-- Wild music of cataracts peals in their gladness,-- Hoarse tempests still shriek to the clouds lightning-fired,-- Dark shadows of glory departed, in sadness Still linger o'er ruins where dwelt the inspired. The voice of the silence for ever is breaking Around the lone heaths of the glory-sung braves; Dim ghosts haunt in sorrow, a land all forsaken, And pour their mist tears o'er the heather-swept graves:-- Can this be the land of the thunder-toned numbers That snowy bards sung in the fire of their bloom? Deserted and blasted, in death's silent slumbers, It glooms o'er my soul like the wreck of a tomb. SUNDERLAND. WM. ALLAN. HIGHLAND FOLK-LORE. BY "NETHER-LOCHABER." FOLK-LORE--a word of recent importation from the German--is a big word, and Highland Folk-Lore is a big subject, so big and comprehensive that not one Magazine article, but a many-chaptered series of Magazine articles would be necessary ere one could aver that he had done his "text" anything like justice. On the present occasion, therefore, we do not pretend to enter into the heart of a subject so extensive and many-sided: we shall content ourselves with a little scouting and skirmishing, so to speak, along the borders of a territory which it is possible we may ask the readers at some future time to explore along with us more at large. A few of the many proverbs, wisdom words, and moral and prudential sentences in daily use shall, in clerical phrase, meantime form "the subject-matter of our discourse." Nor must the reader think that the subject is in any wise _infra dignitate_, unworthy, that is, or undignified. Of the world-renowned Seven Wise Men of Greece, five at least attained to all their eminence and fame no otherwise than because they were the cunning framers of maxims and proverbs that rightly interpreted were calculated to advance and consolidate the moral and material welfare of the nation around them. Of the remaining two, it is true that one was an eminent politician and legislator, and the other a natural philosopher of the first order; but it is questionable if either of them would have been considered entitled to their prominent place in the Grecian _Pleiades_ of Wise Men had they not been proverb-makers and utterers of brief but pregnant "wisdom-words" as well. Even Solomon, the wisest of men, was less celebrated as a botanist and naturalist, though he spake of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall; and of beasts, and of fowls, and of creeping things, and of fishes--less celebrated even as a lyrist, though his songs were a thousand and five,