Again, scenery will help sometimes to settle a question with a young mind, whose intellectual and imaginative faculties are nearly equal, whether it shall turn permanently to philosophy or to poetry. Such dilemmas or Hercules choices are not uncommon; and there is a period in life when the sight of a mountain, or a sunset, or an autumn river, amid its yellow woods, can have more power than even a book, or the influence of an older mind, or a young love-passion, in deciding them. Again, early intimacy with fine scenery furnishes the poetic mind with an exhaustless supply of images. These being sown in youth, sown broadcast, and without any effort of the mind to receive or retain them, bear fruit for ever. It is a shower of morning manna, which no after fervours of noon, or chills of evening, are able to melt or freeze. Or, shall we say the mind of the young, especially if gifted, is a daguerreotype plate of the finest construction, and when surrounded by romantic or lovely scenes, it receives and preserves them to the last, and can reproduce them, too, in ever-varying forms, and perpetual succession? And hence, in fine, it follows, that the greatest poets have either been brought up in the country, or have early come in contact with a beautiful nature, as the names of Homer, Virgil, Shakspeare, Milton, Thomson, Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Wilson, and Thomas Aird, abundantly prove. Beattie employs the greater part of his first Canto of the "Minstrel" in showing the influence of Nature on the dawning mind of a poet. And there can be little doubt that it is the scenery of his own native region, and the progress of his own mind, that he has described. "The long, long vale withdrawn," is the Howe of the Mearns--the "uplands" whence he views it, are the hills of Garvock--the "mountain grey," is the Grampian ridge to the north-west--the "blue main" is the German Ocean, expanding eastward--and the "vale" where the hermit is overheard pouring out his plaint, may not inaptly be figured by that portion of Glen Esk, which meets the all-beautiful Burn, and where "rocks on rocks are piled by magic spell," and where, then as now, "Southward a mountain rose with easy swell, Whose long, long groves eternal murmur made." And, besides, there is his famous piece of cloud scenery, beginning, "And oft the craggy cliff he loved to climb," the truth of which any one may attest by walking up, in the cloudy and dark day, the Cairn-a-Mount, a lofty knoll, across which a road leads to Deeside, to the north of the poet's birthplace, and watching the sea of vapour boiling, shifting, sinking, rising, tumultuating at his feet.