A steede a steede of matchless speed, All else to noble heartes is drosse, The neighyinge of the war-horse prowde, The clangor of the trumpet lowde, Be soundes from heaven that come. May toll from heaven an angel brighte, Then mounte! then mounte, brave gallants, all, Death's couriers, Fame and Honour, call Us to the field againe. No shrewish teares shall fill our eye Our business is like men to fight, JEANIE MORRISON. I've wandered east, I've wandered west, Through mony a weary way; But never, never can forget The luve o' life's young day! The fire that's blawn on Beltane e'en But blacker fa' awaits the heart O dear, dear Jeanie Morrison, Still fling their shadows ow'r my path They blind my een wi' saut, saut tears, And sair and sick I pine, As memory idly summons up The blithe blinks o' langsyne. 'Twas then we luvit ilk ither weel, 'Twas then we twa did part; Sweet time! sad time! twa bairns at schule, Twa bairns and but ae heart! 'Twas then we sat on ae laigh bink, To leir ilk ither lear; And tones and looks and smiles were shed, Remembered ever mair. I wonder, Jeanie, aften yet, Cheek touchin' cheek, loof locked in loof, Thy lids were on thy lesson, but Oh mind ye how we hung our heads, (The scule then skail't at noon), When we ran aff to speel the braes, The broomy braes o' June? My head rins round and round about, As ane by ane the thochts rush back O mornin' life! O mornin' luve ! When hinnied hopes around our hearts Oh, mind ye, luve, how oft we left To wander by the green burnside, The simmer leaves hung ower our heads, The flowers burst round our feet, And in the gloamin' o' the wood The throssil whusslit in the wood, And we with Nature's heart in tune And, on the knowe abune the burn, I' the silentness o' joy, till baith Ay, ay, dear Jeanie Morrison, That was a time, a blessed time, When hearts were fresh and young, When freely gushed all feelings forth Unsyllabled, unsung! I marvel, Jeanie Morrison, Gin I hae been to thee As closely twined wi' earliest thochts Oh! tell me gin their music fills Thine ear as it does mine? Oh! say gin e'er your heart grows grit I've wandered east, I've wandered west, But in my wanderings, far or near, Ye never were forgot. That fount that first burst frae this heart And channels deeper as it rins, Oh, dear, dear Jeanie Morrison, But I could hug all wretchedness, Did I but ken your heart still dreamed XLII. GREAT PROSE WRITERS. LORD BACON-JOHN MILTON-JEREMY TAYLOR-JOHN RUSKIN CONCLUSION. Or the many illustrious prose writers who adorned the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First, Bacon is the one whose shrewdness, and power, and admirable good sense have left the deepest traces in our literature. His essays are still read with avidity and delight, every fresh perusal bringing forth fresh proofs of his knowledge of human nature and felicity of language. We cannot but be grateful to the author, however we may dislike as a man the treacherous friend of Essex and the cringing parasite of James. I do not know any single passage that more advantageously displays his fulness and richness of thought and of style than this on the use of study. "Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring; for ornament is in discourse; and for ability is in the judgment and disposition of business; for expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots, and marshalling of affairs come best from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humour of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience; for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation. Read, not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books; else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man; and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning to seem to know that he doth not." I add one very fine illustration: "If the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified, which as ships pass through the vast sea of Time, and make ages so distant participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other!" In John Milton's grand and holy fame there is no alloy. The man was as great and pure as the author. I am not sure whether (always excepting the minor poems) I do not prefer the stately and weighty march of his prose, even to his lofty and resounding verse. I select some noble passages from his Appeal for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." 66 "I do not deny but it is of the greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men ; and therefore to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors; for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a phial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that which bred them. I know they are as lively, as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragons' teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men; and yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature, God's image: but he who kills a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not often recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men; how spill that treasured life of man preserved and stored up in books, since we see what a homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a kind of martyrdom; and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and soft essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life. * * ** * "Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out and sort asunder, were not more |