For myself, sir, I confess that I love Scotland. I have reason to do so. I have trod the soil of the Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood, I have looked up to the cloud-capt summit of Ben Lomond; have glided among the fairy islets of Loch Katrine; and from the battlements of Stirling Castle, have beheld the links of Forth sparkling in the morning sun. I have done more, sir; I have tasted that generous hospitality of Scotland, which her Majesty's Consul has so justly commemorated; I have held converse with her most eminent sons; I have made my pilgrimage to Melrose Abbey, in company with that modern magician, who, mightier than the magician of old that sleeps beneath the marble floor of its chancel, has hung the garlands of immortal poesy upon its shattered arches, and made its moss-clad ruins a shrine, to be visited by the votary of the muse from the remotest corners of the earth, to the end of time. Yes, sir, musing as I did, in my youth, over the sepulchre of the wizard, once pointed out by the bloody stain of the cross and the image of the archangel:--standing within that consecrated enclosure, under the friendly guidance of him whose genius has made it holy ground; while every nerve within me thrilled with excitement, my fancy kindled with the inspiration of the spot. I seemed to behold, not the vision so magnificently described by the minstrel,--the light, which, as the tomb was opened, broke forth so gloriously, Streamed upward to the chancel roof, And through the galleries far aloof: But I could fancy that I beheld, with sensible perception, the brighter light, which had broken forth from the master mind; which had streamed from his illumined page all-gloriously upward, above the pinnacles of worldly grandeur, till it mingled its equal beams, with that of the brightest constellations, in the intellectual firmament of England."] As 'Auld Lang Syne' brings Scotland one and all, Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills and clear streams, The Dee, the Don, Balgownies brig's black wall, All my boy feelings, all my gentler dreams Of what I then dreamt, clothed in their own pall, Like Banquo's offspring; floating past me seems My childhood, in this childishness of mind; I care not;--'tis a glimpse of 'Auld Lang Syne.' BYRON.