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Thy mother's cheek was wet and pale,
And aft in sighs her words would fail,
When in mine ear she breathed thy tale,
Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

That low sweet voice through many a year,
If life is mine, shall haunt my ear,
Which pictured thee with smile and tear,
Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

Lone was thy hame upon the moor,
Mang dark brown heaths and mountains hoar:
Thou wert a sunbeam at the door,

Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

Blue curling reek on the breeze afloat,
Quiet hovered abune the snaw-white cot,
And strange wild-birds of eeriest note

Swept ever o'er Auchineden.

Sweet-scented nurslings o' sun and dew
In the bosky faulds o' the burn that grew,
Were the only mates thy bairnhood knew,
Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

But the swallow biggit aneath the eaves,
And the bonnie lock shilfa amang the leaves
Aft lilted to thee in the silent eves,

Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

And thou wert ta'en frae this world o' tears,
Unstained by the sorrow or sin o' years;
Thy voice is now in the angels' ears,
Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

The primrose glints on the spring's return,
The merle sings blithe to the dancing burn:
But there's ae sweet flower we aye shall mourn,
Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

There is surely something very exquisite in the sad fluctuating music of these verses-irregular, like the footsteps of one who cannot see his way for tears.

Still more in prose than in verse did Mr. Macdonald at this period direct his energies; and he was happy enough to encounter a subject exactly suited to his powers and mental peculiarities. He was the most uncosmopolitan of mortals. He had the strongest local attachments. In his eyes Scotland was the fairest portion of the planet, Glasgow the fairest portion of Scotland, and Bridgeton-the district of the city in which he was born and in which he dwelt-the fairest portion of Glasgow. have shrieked like a mandrake at uprootal. He never would pass a night away from home. But he was a passionate lover of nature; and the snowdrop called him out of the smoke to Castlemilk, the sleepy lucken-gowan to

He would

His heart clung to every ruin in the neighbourhood like the shrouding ivy; he was deeply learned in epitaphs, and spent many a sunny hour in village churchyards, extracting sweet and bitter thoughts from the half-obliterated inscriptions. Jaques, Izaak Walton, and Old Mortality rolled into one, he knew Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, and Ayrshire by heart. Keenly sensible to natural beauty, and full of antiquarian knowledge, and in possession of a prose style singularly quaint, picturesque, and humorous, he began week by week in the columns of the Citizen the publication of his "Rambles around Glasgow." These sketches were read with avidity, and Caleb1 became in Glasgow a wellknown name. City people were astonished to find the country lying beyond the smoke was far from prosaicthat it had its traditions, its antiquities, its historical associations, and glens and waterfalls worthy of special excursions. These sketches were afterwards collected, and in their separate and more convenient form ran through two editions. No sooner were the "Rambles pleted than Caleb projected a new series of sketches, entitled "Days at the Coast," sketches which also appeared in the columns of a weekly newspaper. Mr. Macdonald's best writing is to be found in this book; several of the descriptive passages are really notable in their way. As we read, the white Firth of Clyde glitters before us, with snowy villages sitting on the green shores; Bute and the twin Cumbraes asleep in sunshine; and, beyond, a stream of lustrous and silvery vapour melting on the grisly Arran peaks. The publication of these sketches raised the reputation of their author; and, like the others, they received the honour of collection and a separate issue. But little more has to be said concerning Mr. Macdonald's literary activity. The early afternoon was already setting in. During the last eighteen months of his life, he was engaged on one of the Glasgow morning journals; and, when in its columns he rambled as of yore, it was with a com

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FATHER, you bid me once more weigh
This Offer, ere I answer, nay.

Charles does me honour; but 'twere vain
To reconsider now again,

And so to doubt the clear-shown truth
I sought for, and received, when youth,
And vanity, and one whose love
Was lovely, woo'd me to remove
From Heav'n my heart's infixed root.
'Tis easiest to be absolute;
And I reject the name of Bride
From no conceit of saintly pride,
But dreading my infirmity,
And ignorance of how to be

Faithful, at once, to the heavenly life,
And the fond duties of a wife.
I narrow am, and want the art
To love two things with all my heart.
Occupied wholly in His search

Who, in the mysteries of the Church,
Returns, and calls them Clouds of Heaven,
I tread a road straight, hard, and even;
But fear to wander all confused,

By two-fold fealty abused.

I either should the one forget,

Or scantly pay the other's debt;
For still it seems to me I make

Love vain by adding "for His sake;"
Nay, at the very thought my breast

Is fill'd with anguish of unrest!

You bade me, Father, count the cost.

I have and all that must be lost

I feel as only women can.

Thy mother's cheek was wet and pale,
And aft in sighs her words would fail,
When in mine ear she breathed thy tale,
Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

That low sweet voice through many a year,
If life is mine, shall haunt my ear,
Which pictured thee with smile and tear,
Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

Lone was thy hame upon the moor,
Mang dark brown heaths and mountains hoar:
Thou wert a sunbeam at the door,

Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

Blue curling reek on the breeze afloat,
Quiet hovered abune the snaw-white cot,
And strange wild-birds of eeriest note

Swept ever o'er Auchineden.

Sweet-scented nurslings o' sun and dew
In the bosky faulds o' the burn that grew,
Were the only mates thy bairnhood knew,
Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

But the swallow biggit aneath the eaves,
And the bonnie lock shilfa amang the leaves
Aft lilted to thee in the silent eves,

Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

And thou wert ta'en frae this world o' tears,
Unstained by the sorrow or sin o' years;
Thy voice is now in the angels' ears,
Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

The primrose glints on the spring's return,
The merle sings blithe to the dancing burn:
But there's ae sweet flower we aye shall mourn,
Wee Anne o' Auchineden.

There is surely something very exquisite in the sad fluctuating music of these verses-irregular, like the footsteps of one who cannot see his way for tears.

Still more in prose than in verse did Mr. Macdonald at this period direct his energies; and he was happy enough to encounter a subject exactly suited to his powers and mental peculiarities. He was the most uncosmopolitan of mortals. He had the strongest local attachments. In his eyes Scotland was the fairest portion of the planet, Glasgow the fairest portion of Scotland, and Bridgeton-the district of the city in which he was born and in which he dwelt-the fairest portion of Glasgow. He would have shrieked like a mandrake at uprootal. He never would pass a night away from home. But he was a passionate lover of nature; and the snowdrop called him out of the smoke to Castlemilk, the sleepy lucken-gowan to

His heart clung to every ruin in the neighbourhood like the shrouding ivy; he was deeply learned in epitaphs, and spent many a sunny hour in village churchyards, extracting sweet and bitter thoughts from the half-obliterated inscriptions. Jaques, Izaak Walton, and Old Mortality rolled into one, he knew Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, and Ayrshire by heart. Keenly sensible to natural beauty, and full of antiquarian knowledge, and in possession of a prose style singularly quaint, picturesque, and humorous, he began week by week in the columns of the Citizen the publication of his "Rambles around Glasgow." These sketches were read with avidity, and Caleb1 became in Glasgow a wellknown name. City people were astonished to find the country lying beyond the smoke was far from prosaicthat it had its traditions, its antiquities, its historical associations, and glens and waterfalls worthy of special excursions. These sketches were afterwards collected, and in their separate and more convenient form ran through two editions. No sooner were the "Rambles" completed than Caleb projected a new series of sketches, entitled "Days at the Coast," sketches which also appeared in the columns of a weekly newspaper. Mr. Macdonald's best writing is to be found in this book; several of the descriptive passages are really notable in their way. As we read, the white Firth of Clyde glitters before us, with snowy villages sitting on the green shores; Bute and the twin Cumbraes asleep in sunshine; and, beyond, a stream of lustrous and silvery vapour melting on the grisly Arran peaks. The publication of these sketches raised the reputation of their author; and, like the others, they received the honour of collection and a separate issue. But little more has to be said concerning Mr. Macdonald's literary activity. The early afternoon was already setting in. During the last eighteen months of his life, he was engaged on one of the Glasgow morning journals; and, when in its columns he rambled as of yore, it was with a com

paratively infirm step, and with an eye that had lost its interest and its lustre. "Nature never did betray the heart that "loved her;" and when the spring-time came, Macdonald, remembering all her former sweetness, journeyed for the last time to Castlemilk to see the snowdrops, for there of all their haunts in the west they come earliest and linger latest. It was a dying visit, an eternal farewell. They were gathered to their graves to

gether. He was neither a great man nor a great poet in the ordinary senses of these terms; but since his removal there are perhaps some half-dozen persons in the world who feel that the "strange superfluous glory of the sum

mer air" lacks something, and that, because an ear and an eye are gone, the colour of the flower is duller, the song of the bird less sweet, than it was in a time they can remember.

THE VICTORIES OF LOVE.

BY COVENTRY PATMORE.

V.-MARY CHURCHILL TO THE DEAN.

FATHER, you bid me once more weigh
This Offer, ere I answer, nay.

Charles does me honour; but 'twere vain
To reconsider now again,

And so to doubt the clear-shown truth
I sought for, and received, when youth,
And vanity, and one whose love
Was lovely, woo'd me to remove
From Heav'n my heart's infixed root.
'Tis easiest to be absolute;
And I reject the name of Bride
From no conceit of saintly pride,
But dreading my infirmity,
And ignorance of how to be

Faithful, at once, to the heavenly life,
And the fond duties of a wife.
I narrow am, and want the art
To love two things with all my heart.
Occupied wholly in His search

Who, in the mysteries of the Church,
Returns, and calls them Clouds of Heaven,
I tread a road straight, hard, and even;
But fear to wander all confused,

By two-fold fealty abused.

I either should the one forget,

Or scantly pay the other's debt;
For still it seems to me I make

Love vain by adding "for His sake;"
Nay, at the very thought my breast

Is fill'd with anguish of unrest!

You bade me, Father, count the cost.

I have and all that must be lost

I feel as only women can.

And through the untender world to move Wrapt safe in his superior love,

How sweet! And children, too: ah, there
Lies, if I dared to look, despair!

And the wife's happy, daily round
Of duties, and their narrow bound,
So plain that to transgress were hard,
Yet full of tangible reward;

Her charities, not marr'd like mine
With fears of thwarting laws divine;
The world's regards and just delight
In one so clearly, kindly right;
I've thought of all, and I endure,
Not without sharp regret be sure,
To give up life's glad certainty,
For what, perchance, may never be.
For nothing of my state I know
But that t'ward heaven I seem to go
As one who fondly landward hies
Along a deck that faster flies!

With every year, meantime, some grace
Of earthly happiness gives place

To humbling ills; the very charms

Of youth being counted henceforth harms;
To blush already seems absurd ;

Nor know I whether I should herd
With girls or wives, or sadliest balk
Maids' merriment, or matrons' talk;
Nor are men's courtesies her dues
Who is not good for show nor use!
To crown these evils, I confess
That faith's terrestrial fruit is less
In joy and honour sensible
Than teachers of religion tell.
The bridal memories of the heart
Grow weaker, rising far apart.

My pray'rs will sudden pleasures move,
And heavenly heights of human love;
But, for the general, none the less,
Sordid and stifling narrowness,

Or worse vacuity, afflicts

The soul that much itself addicts

To sanctity in solitude,

Or serving the ingratitude

Of Christ's complete disguise, His Poor.
Straight is the way, narrow the door,
Howbeit, that leads to life! O'er late,
Besides, 'twere now to change my fate;
The world's delight my soul dejects,
Revenging all my disrespects,

Of old, with incapacity

To chime with even its harmless glee,

Which sounds, from fields beyond my range,

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