My misty Coire! where hinds are roving; My lovely Coire! my charming dell! So grand, so grassy, so richly scented, And gemm’d with flowers of sweetest smell. Thy knolls and hillocks in dark-green clothing, Rise o’er the green sward with gentle swell, Where waves the cannach, and grows the darnel, And troop the wild deer I love so well. Duncan’s chief love-song is characteristic. It is composed for his “spouse newly wedded” and not for an unmarried maiden. This is how the bard describes the manner in which he made choice of “Fair Young Mary”:— My net I cast in the waters clear, And strained hard to draw it to land, And lo! I had caught a bright sea-trout, That lay like a swan on the strand. Pleased was my soul with the fortune That came with such joy to my hand; My spouse! thou art the star of the morning! Blest be thy slumbers and bland! “Aged and grey” he visited the hills for the last time, and composed his “Last Farewell to the Hills,” one of the most pathetic of his poems. Taking a retrospect of the past, he sorrowfully sings:— And yesterday I trode yon moor— How many a thought it moved! The friends I walked with there of yore, Where were those friends I loved! I looked and looked, _and sheep, sheep still_, Were all that I could see: A change had struck the very hill— O world! deceiving me. Few descriptive poets excel Macintyre in his representations of external things, whether animate or inanimate. Everything he touches he invests with the glow and the beauty of poetry. The hills with their mist and deer, the streams and lochs with their teeming inhabitants, and all the natural inhabitants of his native glens and mountains, were congenial themes of his muse. “His Address to his wife—Mairi Bhan Og—may be read beside the sweetest and most expressive of the Lowland lyrics, while it certainly breathes a refined courtesy and a purity of sentiment which these do not always possess, and which is not in any way insignificant in such a man, whether taken as an index of his moral nature, of his intellectual endowments, or of the kindliness of nature in gifting him with such unaffected manliness and good taste.” Macdonald could be sweet and tender when he chose; it was far from being his nature. Macintyre is generally genial and tender, for it is the habitual attitude of his mind and heart. We are told “he was like the rest of the poets, very fond of company and a social glass, and was not only very pleasant over his bottle, but very circumspect.” I give here a specimen of his poem, _Ben-Dorain_, of which we have a translation from the pen of Professor Blackie:—