Of all our author's minor pieces, "The Lay of the Bell" most delights us by its pathetic power, fine execution, and true and striking views of the individual life of man. Take the follow ing: From the steeple Tolls the bell, The death knell! Guiding with dirge-note, solemn, sad, and slow, It is that faithful mother- Who was the mother of that home! The care-the watch-the face-the MOTHER; Sits with unloving looks-another! This quality of earnestness, joined to his intense appreciation of humanity, his comprehensiveness, and philosophic insight, specially fitted him to write history. That he produced fragments only, however admirable, and not a complete historical work, was owing to circumstances, not the inadequacy of his resources. The hand that could so vividly pourtray the opposite characters of Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein-the one so brave and noble, the other so commanding in his wilful and selfish ambition, was fairly equal to other and greater undertakings. Schiller too, possessed that which our own most popular historians fatally lack-reverence, lofty purpose, and faith in the religious feelings and nobler attributes of man. Mere pictures, very clever, but too soulless to awaken serious emotion, or to touch the depths of the heart, Schiller could not have written-he better understood and felt the solemn import, mystery, and meaning which belong to history. This same quality of truth-loving earnestness pervades his dramas. It is owing to this cause that they are deficient in what is termed characterization. Schiller was too much of a moral teacher No two writers could differ more widely in their his own proper personality. His subjectivity or -he felt too deeply as a man to divest himself of mental character than did Goethe and Schiller. self-consciousness was much too great for that The conditioned environed Goethe, and his aims self-abnegation necessary to success in the creation were definite. Schiller's sphere was the absolute; of dramatic character. Hence it is that in his and the ideal perfection which haunted his soul was the object which, with unceasing energy and plays we are most impressed with his glowing effort, he strove to realise and embody. The gar- and his wealth of thought. We are not made to poetry-his pure, elevated sentiments and imagery, den-house at Jena was the witness of his martyr- realise, as in Shakespere, the distinctive indivizeal. The strong pressure of the keen, ardent duality of his characters. Posa, Thekla, Max spirit, all too soon wore out its feeble encasement. Piccolomini, the Maid of Orleans, are much less It was on the 9th of May, 1805, at the age of 49, individuals than disguises of Schiller-and exthat the gentle, devoted, and noble-hearted Freder-ponents, not of their several personalities, but of ick Schiller closed his eyes in death. But it is the glory of genius that its products remain a perennial source of refreshment and delight. So nicely poised and so symmetrical in their structure were Schiller's faculties that it is not in one department of literature only that he excels. Not simply as a dramatist, but as an historian, a poet, a philosophic writer on art, and a novelist has he evinced the extent of his sympathies, and the strength and variety of his powers. He was the pioneer of that cluster of poets who at the beginning of the present century shed a new glory on British literature-and he exerted upon them a perceptible influence the influence which genius combined with lofty moral earnestness cannot fail to exert. Earnestness, indeed, was his predominating quality. Whatever was grand or noble in sentiment and action had peculiar affinity for the mind of Schiller. With a nature so sincere and thoughtful, it was a necessity that he should express the solemn verities felt and perceived by his heart and intellect -and thus, he takes status as a teacher-not of theological dogmas and doctrines-but of the truth which seeks embodiment in art, and expression through literary forms. him. It is but natural to expect that this earnest type of mind should unfit Schiller for writing comedy. The tender, the grave, the pathetic, the heroic, and all the deeper and grander passions of the heart, he had aptitude to to unfold; but he could not bend from his upward express, and capacity gaze to toy with the mere oddities and follies of life. Humour, if he possessed it, lay latent aud undeveloped. In his early studies of Shakespere, he was offended at what he deemed the unseemly intrusions of the jests of fools and clowns. In his view they were unwarrantable breaks and jars upon the dignity of the sentiment, and the grandeur of the conception. Afterwards, he better understood the English dramatist, and the mode of nature. But so far as his own compositions are concerned, jesting, and the wit of wordplaying are excluded. All his dramas, if we may except the first part of 66 Wallenstein," are dignified and stately. It need not, of course, be said, that to Shakespere's wondrous truth in interpreting nature, the German writer can make no pretension. Nor can he lay claim to the flexibility and universality of genius displayed by the "many-sided" Goethe. His, however, were the rare merits of another kind, which we have tried shortly to indicate. And of these it is not | his mind, an incentive to all that is noble, generous, the least, that he has bequeathed to mankind both and heroic, and au influence for all time on the in the example of his life, and in the productions of side of virtue. THE CHILD AND THE LILY. THE CHILD Lo a child with curling ringlets waving freely on the air"I would question thee, sweet flower, of the God that made thee fair; See the lilies of the valley, how they beautify the soil, THE LILY. "Oh tiny little prattling child, already art so proud? Dost thou wish for admiration, or the clamour of the crowd? "Tis with labour that the diamond sparkles like a drop of dew, 'Tis with labour that the yellow ore assumes its sunlit hue; And from morn till eve they labour not, they spin not, do 'Twas with labour and with patience that the banner of the not toil; Yet Solomon, in all his glory, never was arrayed Like the lily of the valley, or the primrose of the glade. “Thy Creator thus hath spoken, and I know not what it means, Cross Was uplifted and was purified from worldliness and dross. "Dost thou envy us our indolence upon the sunny sward? Would'st thou only do good actions for the sake of the reward ? Though my heart is ever open, and for high instruction List-the stormy wind may scatter our fair blossoms on the leans; river, Every evening comes my father homeward, weary, seeking But thy youth will bloom and blossom through eternity for rest But why art thou, O graceful lily, by no cares oppressed? ever; And the Being who is watching o'er the lily on the lea Hath an eye of deep compassion for thy father and for thee.' ADRIAN. THE ROADS THROUGH THE WORLD. CHAPTER XII. THE EVERSTANE FOLK. THE farm of Everstane was full two miles from Kirkhowe to the north. It was a cold-lying place, and had not a kindly soil. The farm buildings were placed on the top of a hill, and they had been erected many years before my time. The Stevensons were then tenants on the farm, and had held it for eight or ten years. They came from far south to the land, and it was thought that they had given a high rent for wet and thin ground. The Stevensons were two brothers, one of whom only was married. Their principal traffic was in cattle and sheep, bought at the markets far in the north, and driven into England. By reason of their frequent journeys to buy and sell beasts, the farm was neglected; and Everstane had always a strushel look. The fields had between them deep, broad ditches, and clumps of thorns for a hedge. The office houses stood in a row with the dwelling-house, and the thatch was always flying down to our place, or somewhere on the way between us. A vast pool of greenish liquid manure stood, summer and winter, within three or four feet of the front door, deep enough The to have made the fortune of Mr. Mechi. The roads through the farm might have been made good and serviceable for a few pounds less than was lost by their haggard condition in any one year; for the horses could not draw half a load over them, even if their harness had ever been out of the need of mending; or the carts ever been in repair. corn yard, and the ground around the houses, were centres of disorder. Litters of straw lay in any nook where it was sheltered from the wind. Young beasts strayed wherever their instinct led them; and, like human beings, they always went wrong. A flock of ducks and hens lived in perfect independence of all control; and, of course, half the chickens were eaten by the cats, or worried by the dogs, and half the eggs were lost. The men and women servants took their own course, even at the busy seasons; for one master was north and another was south; while the mistress was driving through the yard, chasing clothes put np to dry, and made waifs of by the blast; or so busy that she had never time to dress completely, and looked like a person raised out of a sleep on some exigency. Then Mrs. Stevenson's life was one continued exigency. Three or four successful in his business, and had even attained to the dignity and honour of a magistrate. In that capacity he was distinguished by a systematic hunting down of poverty-not that he had not been poor, but he had struggled through, saving and striving, to wealth, and he believed that every person could and should follow his example. The early path of the rich man is hid in the mists of obscurity. How he laboured and lived few men knew. By what agonies his first thousand pounds were accumulated, or whether they came by a sudden stroke of fortune, he never chose to tell. Afterwards he was subtle to all, subservient to the rich, and hard to his workmen ; until the thousand pounds had grown into twenty; and then, the owner of a good name and a respectable man, could have no difficulty in climbing onwards and upwards. He had an only sister, married to a Scotch cattle-dealer. In the early part of his life he had nothing to spare for her, and as postage was costly, and neither of the relatives was apt to waste upon the affections of the heart, their communications were few and far between. In after years, discovering that a solitary man became weak, and one life too short for the establishment of a great name in the world, he coup-bethought himself of his sister's son. The dis young girls took of their mother. We had them at the school, aud they always seemed anxious to be doing something, and never had anything well done. Johnnie Stevenson was an only son-a dour boy, hard as the quarry stones. I remember his appearance well before he left us, for he was kept long enough at the school, though he learned nothing but arithmetic. He had no younger brothers, and had grown out of his ordinary jacket and everything else-so that its sleeves came not within two inches of his dirty hands and red wrists-while his trousers left a space between them and the top of his half-boots; and another space was left yawuing wide between their upper hem and those ample pockets of his vest that seemed made to carry the contents of a little pack. Once, the comforter twisted round his neck had been red; although now it was of many colours, and the bonnet on his uncombed hair had been blue. It covered a round, bullety head, hard and thick, with a petted face, strongly marked by bad temper, and mud cleaving to the skin, as if in defiance of water. The boy was spoiled; although that might have been originally a matter of easy accomplishment. He had grown up like the stirks at Everstane, without much kindly tending, and he must have inherited the " ing" propensities of his father, for he carried a quantity of odds and ends, knives, marbles, and snuff-boxes, and bartered or bought industriously, and usually to a profit. He was not a likeable boy, but he was far over my class and years; and we should not have known his propensities, if he had not indulged a love for the young, originating in their being more safely bullied and more easily cheated than the lads of his own age. Still, as he was the first among our schoolfellows, whom I remember, who left us for a far distant land, the very rumble of the cart wheels in which he sat, surrounded by bags, and chests, and sisters, as his uncle drove him past the school down to the town, on his road to London, appeared to have a melancholy, sullen sound. He was then a lad of sixteen or seventeen, and, as his mother had a brother who had become amazingly rich in the great metropolis, —an event not in any way astonishing, if the old man was endowed with his relative's qualifications for successful trading-and as the London tradesman was an old unmarried bachelor, nothing better could have been devised for his nephew than to ship him off to his care; for Everstane, as before said, was a bad bargain made worse by bad management, and Jock Steinson had never evinced the slightest love for hard work. The family may have felt a natural sort of regret at parting with their only brother and son, but it must have all been lost upon him, for he had already adopted the creed of selfishness; and was upon the road to practise it. His uncle went to London before the commencement of a great war. He was a hard working person, with not a few good qualities, that somehow got choked up with the cares of the world and of riches. He had been wonderfully cussion of his proposal was probably advanced by bad bargains in the cattle trade, and short crops. At any rate, it was adopted, and we missed the big, round head of Jock Steinson on the form next the fire in the school house ever afterwards. A few years after that, the farm of Everstane was given up, the stocking was sold, and the family went back to the south country, where it was said that the Steinsons got places as domestic servants, and the old people were to live upon cow-keeping in one of the large towns. Part of my informa tion is only hearsay, for I was gone ere they left Kirkhowe into another part of the world altogether, or a part I then would have thought out of our world. It might have been nearly thirty years from the day when I noticed the cart with Jock Steinson that I next met him. It was a cold, raw day of the fading summer. A thin mist, charged with foulsome vapours, which the learned call miasma, reeked off the Thames. The tide was far back, and the sand banks beneath Westminster Bridge looked like little islands. The common sewers poured forth huge waves of wealth to farmers, now turned into destruction, as they coloured the river for some distance from their embochure. The banks on each side were dreary; but those on the south side looked like a dismal succession of wrecks after a storm. The passengers on the White Rose, the very ugliest steamer that ever carried passengers for twopence, made a rush to the bow, and my eyes were abstracted from an able pamphlet by a clever member of the Board of Trade, which I was reading, as suitable to the place and time, being an elaborate proof that the value of liquid and urban manure is twenty to " TNE NETHERSTANE FARM. twenty-one millions sterling annually-to a passing barge, or boat, of most preposterous and ungainly appearance; as if the King of Siam had sent an ambassador to Westminster in his own regal ship of state; and there, upon what was probably the place of honour, stood the identical Jock Steinson, in a chain of gold and a skyreing scarlet robe. I had long ere then read much of the transmigration of souls, and knew more of the transmutation of bodies; so that, although I had heard nothing of Jock's prosperity, his appearance neither astonished nor shocked me; for I had finished the semi-official demonstration touching liquid manure, as the boat touched Battersea Bridge pier, and I abandoned the White Rose, of which thereafter I learned nothing-although I came to know something of the passenger by the grotesque barge. CHAPTER XIII. THE NETHERSTANE FARM. THIS farm was nearer to the village by a good for 175 common height and productiveness. Farther back clustered the barn, byres, and stables, making three sides of a square; and the centre at Everstane would have been full of some green liquid, that there was always absorbed in straw, and even earth and weeds thrown upon the heap; for at that time pipes to carry away liquids through fields, and steam-engines to thresh corn, far less steamploughs to break up the rigs, or steam-scythes to cut down the corn, had not been heard of. The corn yard was at the north-west side, and the ricks were built to shelter the steading from the cold winds from the glens, and on the north-east side the long hay and peat stacks were shelters from other cold winds, in winter. The steading of Netherstane was thus like the British coustitution in these days, and with considerably more reason, the envy of surrounding neighbours. Some even good people among them thought it too clean, neat, and upsetting for a small farm. Subsequent experience in the world has convinced me that these things pay. I remember once hearing the farmer of Netherstane complaining of his neighbours' weeds, which he said cost him a good deal of money every year. I could not see how that could be explained then; but anyone would observe that the weeds never got up to flowering and seeding on his own farm. was always busy in removing stones and weeds when the ground was not covered, and it may be doubted whether careless farming does not cost more for weeds than a small rental. He The Netherstane children were well grown up, except two or three who were near my age, and there were nine altogether. Farms do not multiply like farmers, and it was clear that some of the young people would be obliged to try another trade. The elder son, David, went from home only a few days after Steinson was sent to London; but he did not go so far away; for he often returned home on Saturday evenings, at which everybody was glad who knew the Robertsons, for they were well liked; although they were something different from other folks, for they neither came to the kirk, nor did they go up to the Secession meeting at Millhall; but they belonged to some other and peculiar body, of whom there were few near us, and none except themselves nearer than the town. They were Baptists, as I was afterwards told. As years flew by, David Robertson wore up in his apprenticeship, and grew to be a strong man, but I lost sight of him, as of everybody else dwelling near Kirkhowe, some time thereafter; only ofttimes I remember him, because he was always wonderfully kind to the little boys, and contrived ways to amuse them; and, although he never did anything in Steinson's manner of trafficking, and was no hand at a bargain, yet he had nevertheless an open hand in small things, which were large to us then. It is improbable that he often recollected me, being a much greater person during our acquaintance; for it has often occurred to me with what ease the stronger might store past for themselves in the minds of the weaker grateful recollections, without even knowing that they had so much stock. CHAPTER XIV. THE LITTLE LEGACIES. WHEN the harvest was ingathered, when the days were short, when the frost was in the air, and the snow was on the ground, as Yule time drew near, and nature looked dead, but little birds were living and searching out morsels that kindly hearts flung them-and even the burn and the water were dumb, for the frost had quieted them-upon a clear, moonlight evening, with only one or two stars visible in the sky, a number of the neighbours, boys and girls, were all muffled up in such a multitude of little warm cloaks and cravats as it seemed a larger village could not have supplied, and were all guided down to Blinkbonnie, by Mr. Green, who had come all the way from Edinburgh to be present, for he was dwelling there again at his studies; and Mr. Smith, the elder son of the farmer of the Racketts, who was helper to Mr. Petrie in these days. The house had been all completed and finished, and the people in that country thought it strange that an old gentleman should have a house-heating of little children only, and they but the young folk of the village; yet it was not so unnatural, if one only thinks that he had selected those in whom his daughter, when alive, had felt a very warm interest that being just all the village population between six or seven and twelve or fourteen. After many injunctions and warnings, how and what to do, we all set out, travelling over our half mile quickly and timidly, for it was a serious thing with us to enter that great house, with all its grandeur, as we had heard of it by report. Rumour had exaggerated, as usual, the ostensible riches of Blinkbonnie. The hall had all been repainted in sombre colouring. The lamp swung from the ceiling was glittering in our eyes. The skin of a striped animal, such as we have not in our land, was spread over a table in the hall; and it contained many ornaments rough in their nature, but valuable for the way that they had been brought. The large room where we were collected had a brilliant light from many candles, the floor was soft to tread upon, for the carpets were new and rich-engravings and paintings were hung around the walls, so beautiful that scenes so fair seemed to have been drawn in the stars, or some most happy world-books bound in gold upon a beautiful red ground were placed upon one table; even the walls of the room were painted with beauteous roses, as they seemed to us, and, when we sat down, the seats of the chairs were so soft that most of us were afraid of sinking through them altogether. However, when Mrs. More came in, we were quite at home; and then when Mr. Rose himself and Doctor More, with Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Petrie came, our festi val commeneed; astonishing us in its materials fully more, perhaps, than the scene of the feast in its splendour. And then, when all that was over, we were shown many strange productions of foreign climes, and heard explanations respecting them, which we could all comprehend; for when Mr. Rose spoke to us himself, he seemed to have no learning whatever-it was so easy to understand him. Next the servants brought in curious fruits, more pleasant some of them to eat than to examine, for there were figs from Smyrna, and raisins from Greece, and oranges from Seville, and apples and pears from Blinkbonnie's gardens, ruddier or sweeter than the foreign fruits; but of course they had been carried no distance. Then Dr. More told us something of Turkey and the false prophet, as from that country came the figs; and Mr. Fletcher described Spain, but not so well as old James Dawson, who had been a colour-sergeant and had a pension, could do-and often had done but the minister added something respecting the Pope-and Mr. Green said a few words for Greece and its raisins, also Aristides and Epaminondas and Themistocles, but I knew all respecting them, only it was new to hear of Greece being to be born again and revive. Poor Mr. Green-like all young students-it was but a small revival that was then expected. It was curious that Mr. Fletcher who never had time to tell all that he wanted to say in three quarters of an hour in his pulpit, could finish Spain and the Pope in ten minutes at Blinkbonnie, and his was the longest speech in the evening for I noticed the movements of a very small clock on the marble mantle piece, being concerned in it at the time, seeing no pendulum thereto, nor place where anything of that kind could exist. After eight struck upon it with a clear sweet and silvery sound-a number of little books and other articles were spread out upon the table; and Mr. Rose said that he had called us all together, because we had all been his daughter's friends—and he was sure that we all recollected her kindly, and that if she had been living then, we would all have been down at this house; and also he thought that if she had seen her death coming soon-she probably would have given us all some memorial of her; and therefore he had provided books to some, and other little presents to others, and Mrs. More had marked them all, and fixed to whom each article would be given, and he hoped that we would be able to keep them long for her sake, who, he was told, had prayed and watched that all her young friends and neighbours might have happiness while they lived, and the rest of the people of God when they died; and now Mr. Fletcher would hand all the memorials round to those for whom they were designed. The old gentleman spoke very composedly to us, like one who has got above the waves of trouble, yet lives with its weight around him; but as this scene came upon us very suddenly all the children were grieved; and no more |