If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild but to flout the ruins gray. When the broken arches are dark in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruin'd central tower; When buttress and buttress, alternately, Seem framed of ebon and ivory; Wnen silver edges the imagery, And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die; When distant Tweed is heard to rave, And the howlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave, Then go--but go alone the while-- Then view St. David's[2] ruined pile; And, home returning, soothly swear, Was never scene so sad and fair. * * * * * By a steel-clench'd postern door, They enter'd now the chancel tall; The darken'd roof rose high aloof On pillars, lofty, light, and small; The key-stone, that lock'd each ribbed aisle, Was a fleur-de-lys or a quatre-feuille; The corbells[3] were carved grotesque and grim; And the pillars, with cluster'd shafts so trim, With base and capital furnish'd around, Seem'd bundles of lances which garlands had bound. * * * * * The moon on the east oriel shone, Through slender shafts of shapely stone, By foliated tracery combined; Thou would'st have thought some fairy's hand 'Twixt poplars straight the osier wand In many a freakish knot had twined; Then framed a spell, when the work was done, And changed the willow-wreaths to stone.[4] [2] Built by David I. in 1136. [3] Corbells, the projections from which the arches spring, usually cut in a fantastic face, or mask. [4] Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel." The monks of Melrose were caricatured for their sensuality at the Reformation. Their Abbey suffered in consequence; for the condemnator, out of the ruins, built himself a house, which may still be seen near the church. "The regality," says Mr. Chambers, "soon after passed into the hands of Lord Binning, an eminent lawyer, ancestor to the Earl of Haddington; and about a century ago, the whole became the property of the Buccleuch family." * * * * * LACONICS. (_For the Mirror_.) The most important advantages we enjoy, and the greatest discoveries that science can boast, have proceeded from men who have either seen little of the world, or have secluded themselves entirely for the purposes of study. Not only those arts which are exclusively the result of calculation, such as navigation, mechanism, and others, but even agriculture, may be said to derive its improvement, if not its origin, from the same source. Where a cause is good, an appeal should be directed to the heart rather than the head: the application comes more home, and reaches more forcibly, where it is the most necessary--the natural rather than the improved faculties of the human understanding.