faculties with voluntary toil of another kind, and disclosed a delicate vein of verse in those dark places where nothing lovely was to be looked for. We do not hesitate to apply to him, in his poverty and homeliness, the same test which we should apply to the neophyte most favoured by fortune. Here he stands, with his verses, at the bar, confronting us with the attitude of a true poet-not alarmed, not assured, but with a sweet light in his eyes, the brightness of that unpurchasable consciousness which knows it has already had its reward in the consoling and strengthening of its own heart. He is not dramatic nor tragical, nor passionate to speak of he stands at disadvantage under the shadow which Burns has left on Scotland; and what we have to decide is, whether, whatever his place in the ranks, this new writer is or is not entitled to the name of poet. even In other circumstances it might be impertinent to refer to the life of a new candidate for public favour in illustration of his work, but Mr Wingate has himself put upon record the early particulars of a modest and manful existence, shadowed by many of the heaviest clouds which can darken the beginning of a mortal career, and has by so doing furnished us with a better poem than, we may be permitted to say, any that he has yet written. It is not a passionate epic in which the light from heaven becomes a light that leads astray, and splendid excuse for evil; a sweeter strain rises from the inarticulate depths in the simple story of the young poet. Through those darkened and sulphurous ways he walks, if not in glory and in joy like his great countryman, yet with a radiance of tender thought around him, a little atmosphere of his own, in which, dark as the mine is, and hard the toil, all the sweetest influences of life concentrate and glow, making a sunshine in the shady place. True and real as pain and hardship can be are all the grim details around. He creeps through the narrow tramways a ten-year-old child; he comes to the maturity of his strength amid the dusky recesses of the pit; he reaches the acme of his trade, and at last becomes a miner, lying on his back in a narrow seam, cramped up in purgatorial compression, no space any where except for the motion of the tedious " pick," which clears out further hollows in the dark, and brings showers of black dust over the contorted figure;-but let no man pity the collier. In his soul he has an unspeakable sweet relief from all this darkness. Hundreds of men walk above ground and see the sunshine who cannot see what he is seeing, doubled up there in his crevice; a world of his own, gleaming with that light which never was on sea or land, encompasses him even there. The coarse life round him softens its harsher shadows under his eyes. He sings the hardships of his sore existence with pathetic simple force, and sighs that come out of the depth of his heart-but there is no bitterness in the complaint. Half unawares, half conscious is the compensation which makes up to him for all his cares. Now and then he acknowledges it, and bursts into joyful avowal of his dreams, in which he is a king, and which, with the simplicity of genius, he takes it for granted his friends must share. Here is an example of the way in which this wonderful balance is set even, and the poise adjusted, which to ordinary eyes is so far out of the level of comfort. He has been down all day in the pit, and has come up black and weary, in the very lowest vein of life, as any passing stranger might conclude-a poor soul, good for nothing but the merest material rest. Is it so? Let us hear what the poet says. This is how God indemnifies him for the troubles of his lot :"Yon plodding wretch whom Fate appears To loathe, around whose snail-paced years How could he his existence keep Throng woes of every kindWere all the phantasies of sleep Forbidden to his mind? I often think, and long have thought, But dreaming, and seeming I deem it, esteem it, A great and priceless boon. How fresh last night the mountain air A zone of mist hung round the 'Ben,' The heathery hills I clomb, From my tired limbs at home! To whom it is denied For days to see the light of heaven, Let's hug the thought with pride, This is the true alchemy of the poet. Driven to his last stronghold, able to weave nothing beautiful out of his rude days, here he takes refuge in the night. He counts it "a waste of time" to "sleep and dream of nought;" but when in the visions of his rest he can believe himself roaming "abroad at noon," breathing the mountain air, seeing the loch and the Ben, and the golden haze of morn," his troubles flee away from him; he accepts his dreams as "a special blessing." In the long night, when he sleeps his sleep of toil, he can wander "far" from his "tired limbs at home." It is impossible to imagine a philosophy more tenderly consolatory—a sweeter heart to a hard life. To do this requires no small power, and necessitates a faculty exquisite in its kind — a nobler fashion of poetry than any mere utterance. The man thus compensated by Heaven for all the mean conditions of his life is not a man to be patronised as a collier-poet. It is for us to hear what he says, with all the respect due to one who has proved his own possession of an incommunicable gift. He has his own reward and consolation, like any other poet, independent of what all or any critics may say to him; and puts not only verses into print, but, more effectual far, a noble poetry into the life, which he thus, all toilsome, dark, and uninviting as it is, sweetens, amid its weary deprivations, by a touch of fancy so absolute yet so simple. These compensations, however, had scarcely bloomed into existence when the poet's hard career began. He went "down," as he describes it in his autobiography,* when he had just completed his ninth year. "There was a custom among colliers at that time which permitted the fatherless sons of men of their class to go to the pit one year earlier than the sons of fathers who were alive, and I was one of the unfortunates entitled to enjoy the benefit of that custom." The poor child found it mournful work enough to encounter not only the darkness and premature toil, but the tyrannies and cruelties of the pit. "So much to heart did I take this," he says, "that I have often sat for whole days in remote places of the pit without a light, and indifferent to the dangers round me." Here is his own picture, painfully true and simple, of the shivering boy, whose experiences he could so well put on record : "He's up at early morning, howe'er the win' may blaw, Lang before the sun comes roun' to chase the stars awa'; And 'mang a thoosand dangers, unkent in sweet daylight, He'll toil until the stars again keek through the chilly night. See the puir wee callan', 'neath the cauld clear moon! His knees oot through his troosers, and his taes oot through his shoon; Wading through the freezing snaw, thinking owre again, How happy every wean maun be that's no a collier's wean. * Published in the Commonwealth,' a Glasgow newspaper, in 1856. His cheeks are blae wi' cauld, and the chittering winna cease, To gie the hungry callan' time to eat his mornin' piece; His lamp is burning on his head wi' feeble flickering ray, And in his heart the lamp o' Hope is burning feebly tae. Nae wonner that the callan's sweert to face his daily toil, Nae wonner he sae seldom greets the morning wi' a smile; For weel he kens he's growing up to face the cauld disdain That lang the world has measured oot to every collier's wean. The puir wee hirpling laddie! how mournfully he's gaun, Aye dichting aff the ither tear wi's wee hard hackit haun'! Sair, sair, he's temptit 'mang the snaw to toom his flask o' oil, But ah!-ae flash o' faither's ire were waur than weeks o' toil. In vain the stars look on the youth wi' merry twinkling een, Through clouds o' care sae dense as his their glory is nae seen; He thinks 'twad been a better plan if coal had boonmost* lain, And wonners why his faither made a collier o' his wean." This pathetic simple picture is touched with a tender reserve and delicacy, which gives it double force. The sad, little, wistful figure, with childish tears and despairs and manfulness the chilly morning atmosphere trembling with white snow and moonlight-the faint light of the lamp the teeth that chatter too much to eat that forlorn "piece "the silent tears wiped off by the little hard hand-every touch tells. But still there is no bitterness in the little fellow's heart. He is too young to have entered upon his inheritance of the glory of the stars, but still his thoughts are sweet even in their complaining; he thinks "how happy every wean maun be that's no a collier's wean; " he thinks it would have been a better arrangement had the coal lain uppermost; he wonders, perhaps, why his father should have made him a collier-nothing worse or harder is in his forlorn little heart; and, all unconscious to the child and the poet, the snow-bound firmament about him trembles with hope. A * friend tells us how, after reading this, he took down Mrs Browning's poems and read her 'Cry of the Children;' never was contrast more marked. Though that lady of the art, so missed and mourned, is beyond all question a much greater poet than David Wingate, this little collier boy, between the moonlight and the snow, is a finer and far truer conception than the despairing and tragic babies in her wonderful poem. They fly in clouds, like the spirits in Dante's purgatory, blown about by a wind of moaning, in a sublimity of hopelessness most effective but quite unreal. Very different is that little hero, with his silent single tears and his morning "piece," and that wistful wonder in his heart why God did not lay the coal uppermost. Whatever comes of him he will be a man, still somehow in harmony with nature and loyal to heaven,-a hero, perhaps, if the pit falls in, or the fire-damp breathes its poisonous breath upon him. The sensation produced by the two poems is totally different. Bitter wrong and injustice breathes out of Mrs Browning's eloquent 'Cry'-but the little collier has no bitterness in him; his little soul is sad but not injured; and for him, as for all men, God has compensation in store. In the one case it is a poet speaking indignant and passionate for others, whose wrongs the burning eyes of genius intensify and exaggerate; in the other, it is the poet, all aware of the sweetnesses which are intermingled with the saddest life, who speaks manful and tender, if sad, for himself: and the change of treatment makes all the difference between superhuman woe and misery, and that human hardship which, though heart-breaking, is, if God so wills it, not only to be endured, but to be endured nobly, without forfeiture of the highest privileges of man. The collier-orphan lived through this sad beginning, God having better things and valuable uses in • Uppermost. store for him. When he came to youth he "lived," as he says, "at an old farm-steading, so that a ramble in a green field was easily commanded. My idle days, which, in the summer time, were rather plentiful, were spent generally in the woods or fields." When he was seventeen he became the principal support of his mother's family; he and his elder sister, who "wrought in a mill at Pollokshaws," keeping, by their united wages, the household "above poverty." At twenty-two the young man married, and in that early portion of his life made "a mad tour to the Highlands round Loch Lomond, and another to Burns's monument in Ayrshire, performed mostly on foot." Notwithstanding the pit and poverty, life had not been without its alleviations all this time. He had have set his lady more apart from all the soils of common thought than this collier-lover sets the humble maiden who has given him her modest heart. The poem has appeared so lately in these pages that we cannot quote it entire as we would gladly do; but we know no sketch of morning-love, guiltless of complications and sweet with the dews of youth, more tender and true than that which is contained in the following verses :— "My little wife often round the church hill, Sweet little, dear little, neat-footed Jane, Walked slowly, and lonely, and thoughtful, until The afternoon bell chimed its call o'er And nothing seemed sweeter And tell her what weather'twas likely to be, The selfish wish growing, That all her affections were centred in me. true), Sweet little, dear little, 'love-troubled Jane, So deeply absorbed in her day-dreaming grew, The bell chimed and ceased, yet she heard not its strain; And I, walking near her (May love ever cheer her Who thinks all such wandering of sin void Strove hard to persuade her My little wife well, perhaps this was wrongSweet little, dear little, warm-hearted Jane, become "a member of a library My little wife once ('tis strange, but 'tis which had started in the neighbouring burgh;" he had taken to reading-he had fallen in love. In this latter amusement the poet did not miss his necessary training; his first attempt at love-making failed, and the nineteen-year-old collier despaired like a Byron. But there are few effusions of the lover in Mr Wingate's volume. When the nobler love came, he had, he says, the 'happiest courtship of about three years," and sang of his Janet to all the echoes. But either his genius is too gentle to answer at its best to this inspiration, or his riper judgment has rejected these youthful vanities. The very few verses which can be anyhow called loveverses in the book, are not among the most notable of his efforts, excepting the one little poem-exquisite of its kind-in which, once for all, the lover-husband tells the story of his wooing, and celebrates with manly tenderness the love and the graces of 'My little wife.' There are few verses in the language more pure, tender, and musical, nor any love-utterance we can remember more refined and delicate in its simplicity than this charming little poem. Montrose himself could not Sat on the hillside till her shadow grew long, Nor tired of the preacher that thus could detain. I argued so neatly, And proved so completely She smiled when I blessed her, Was ever a love-tale more tenderly told? That Scotch Sunday, of the gloom of which so many witlings prate, but upon which the sun shines all the same, as the little maiden wanders "slowly, and lonely, and thoughtful" within the sound of the church-bell-the innocent guilt of that forgetfulness which makes the pair oblivious when its call is overr-the lingering on the hillside (though perhaps this was wrong) till the modest little shadow lengthens, out of all possibility of further forgetfulness;never was a prettier picture. There is not a touch of exaggeration, a tint, or a line too much. In perfect pastoral simplicity, delicacy, and tenderness, the two linger in the slant sunshine in the Sabbath calm. The church-bell, the gentle touch of possible wrong, the solitude into which the pair naturally fall when all the world is at its devotions, has the sweetest Scotch individuality, yet is as catholic as love and youth. This is the only love-poem worthy the name in Mr Wingate's book; and it is entirely characteristic of the sweetness and purity of his gift. Full of deep feeling, but not impassioned loyal and lawful, breathing nothing but honour and modesty is the strain. He has nothing else to say upon this subject of which many men have sung more warmly, but none with a more tender refinement of feeling and thought. This new step in life, however, involved the poet in darker clouds than any he had hitherto known. When men marry at twenty-two, they must naturally accept, along with their privileges, an earlier initiation into the burdens of individual life. "Such shall have trouble in the flesh." "I was married in 1850," he says in his narrative. "In the same year, Mary our daughter was born, and I at the same time was taken ill with a bilious complaint, which confined me for many weeks. The income we-that is, my wife and myself had promised ourselves from our mutual labours, was thus suddenly cut off, and we found ourselves at once deep into the world's cares, in which it was our unlucky destiny not to founder at once. When I was able to resume work, the wages I made were but trifling, owing to an unfortunate change of places I had made, so that we continued to take lessons in the art of practical economy under a harder master than it had been either of our lots hitherto to come under. I had still been scribbling a little now and then, and one result of it was, that, in the autumn of 1850, I think, I had the satisfaction of seeing an elaborate notice of my humble self in the columns of the 'Glasgow Citizen' newspaper, accompanied by a few effusions of mine, and the whole done up in a style most dangerous to a person of my temperament. I had hoped, in my transcendent vanity, that my translation from the pit was at hand; and in brooding over the disappointment I experienced, I delivered myself of an imitation of Hood's Song of the Shirt.' Shortly after, I got employment as a canvasser to a book-firm in Glasgow. My new vocation I joined in high spirits; but a few days satisfied me that my success in the book line would not be very remarkable. I could not divest myself of the idea that I was an impostor of some sort, whose business it was to cajole people into purchasing books which were in my opinion too dear. Still, I was out of the pit; collier's wages were low at the time; and as I earned from seven to seventeen shillings per week, we managed to exist. At last, the uncertainty of the wage, joined to a conviction that my assurance was not equal to my calling, made me resolve on leaving it. I then got employment as a labourer in a coppersmith's shop in Glasgow, where, after a while, I got thirteen shillings weekly, and remained there some sixteen months or so. But the fumes of the copper-shop agreed not with my constitution; moreover, the road I had to travel was too long, being four miles night and morning; and at length an ailment of the eyes forced me to leave this shop. When my eyes were sufficiently recovered, I once more joined my legitimate trade. Strange as it may seem, I experienced a degree of joy on my return to the pit, which can only be |