Thou still canst see the moon and all her daughters
Wander above thy wastes-and hear the lakes,
With the majestic voices of their waters,

Ring up among the crags, and through the brakes;
And thou canst list the staghound, or the beagle,
Coursing the boundless moors and mountains dun,
And follow in her path the mighty eagle,
Riding unscared, proud pinion of the sun.

And thou canst list the savage torrent singing
Among the fractured rocks, alone and loud,
And mark the masses of the pinewoods swinging
Above the bald crags, like some thunder cloud ;-
The pathless hills that in the mist seem dreaming,
And the blue surgy lochs that lash the shore--
The falcon on her course of glory swimming---
The million clouds that sweep the desert o'er ;-

All break upon thy soul, as fresh and shining
As when thy bow of life was firmly strung;
And thou dost see them, in thy years declining,
As green as Ossian saw them when he sung.
The sky-the frith-the glen-the castle hoary-
The wild stream rushing far among the braes-
The hunter's narrow house-the yawning corrie-
The stone that tells the tales of other days,-

Though they have vanish'd and the tale of sorrow
Echoes alone athwart the hill-side now;
Though on the night of Scotland dawns no morrow-
Though Fame's old tree is lopped off every bough-
Still dost thou see them all, and they are letter'd
Upon thy inmost heart;-though poor and lone,
Yet wander where thou wilt, thy soul is fetter'd
To the bleak cliffs of rugged Caledon.

There is a charm, which years cannot destroy,
A holy spell that will not pass away,—
Which links us with a melancholy joy
To every vision of our life's young day.

The heart may wither, and the eye-ball perish,

But these are dreams that will not leave the breast-
Visions of glory, which the mind will cherish
Until that little trembler is at rest!

D. M.

A TALE OF THE PLAGUE IN EDINBURGH.*

In several parts of Scotland such things are to be found as tales of the plague. Amidst so much human suffering as the events of a pestilence necessarily involved, it is of course to be supposed, that occasionally circumstances would occur of a peculiarly disastrous and affecting description-that many loving hearts would be torn asunder, or laid side by side in the grave-many orphans left desolate, and patriarchs bereft of all their descendants and that cases of so painful a sort as called forth greater compassion at the time, would be remembered after much of the ordinary details was generally forgotten. The celebrated story of Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, is a case in point. So romantic, so mournful a tale, appealing, as it does, to every bosom, could not fail to be commemorated, even though it had been destitute of the great charm of locality. In the course of our researches, we have likewise picked up a few extraordinary circumstances connected with the last visit paid by the plague to Edinburgh, which, improbable as they may perhaps appear, we believe to be, to a certain extent, allied to truth, and shall now submit them to our readers.

When Edinburgh was afflicted, for the last time, with the pestilence, such was its effect upon the energies of the citizens, and so long was its continuance, that the grass grew on the principal street, and even at the Cross, though that Scottish Rialto was then perhaps the most crowded thoroughfare in Britain. Silence, more than that of the stillest midnight, pervaded the streets during the day. The sunlight fell upon the quiet houses as it falls on a line of sombre and neglected tombstones in some sequestered churchyard-gilding, but not altering their desolate features. The area of the High Street, on being entered by a stranger, might have been contemplated with feelings similar to those with which Christian, in the Pilgrim's Progress, viewed the awful court-yard of Giant Despair; for in that wellimagined scene, the very ground bore the marks of wildness and desolation; every window around, like the loop-holes of the dungeons in Doubting-Castle, seemed to tell its tale of misery within, and the whole seemed to lie prostrate and powerless under the dominion of an unseen demon, which fancy might have conceived as stalking around in a bodily form, leisurely dooming its subjects to successive execution.

When the pestilence was at its greatest height, a strange perplexity began, and not without reason, to take possession of the few physicians and nurses who attended the sick. It was customary for the * From Chambers' Edinburgh Journal.

distempered to die, or, as the rare case happened, to recover on a particular day after having first exhibited symptoms of illness. This was an understood rule of the plague, which had never been known to fail. All at once, it began to appear, that a good many people, especially those who were left alone in their houses by the death or desertion of their friends, died before the arrival of the critical day. In some of these cases, not only was the rule of the disease broken, but what vexed the physicians more, the powers of medicine seemed to have been set at defiance; for several patients of distinction, who had been able to purchase good attendance, and were therefore considered as in less than ordinary danger, were found to have expired after taking salutary drugs, and being left with good hopes by their physicians. It almost seemed as if some new disease were beginning to ingraft itself upon the pestilence-a new feature rising upon its horrid aspect. Subtile and fatal as it formerly was, it was now inconceivably more so. It could formerly be calculated upon; but it was now quite arbitrary and precarious. Medicine had lost its power over it. God, who created it in its first monstrous form, appeared to have endowed it with an additional sting, against which feeble mortality could present no competent shield. Physicians beheld its new ravages with surprise and despair; and a deeper shade of horror was spread in consequence over the public mind.

As an air of more than natural mystery seemed to accompany this truly calamitous turn of affairs, it was, of course, to be expected, in that superstitious age, that many would attribute it to a more than natural cause. By the ministers it was taken for an additional manifestation of God's wrath, and as such held forth in not a few pulpits, accompanied with all the due exhortations to a better life, which it was not unlikely would be attended with good effect among the thin congregations of haggard and terrified scarecrows, who persisted in meeting regularly at places of worship. The learned puzzled themselves with conjectures as to its probable causes and cures; while the common people gave way to the most wild and fanciful surmises, almost all of which were as far from the truth. The only popular observation worthy of any attention, was, that the greater part of those who suffered from this new disease died during the night, and all of them while unattended.

Not many days after the alarm first arose, a poor woman arrested a physician in the street, and desired to confer with him a brief space. He at first shook her off, saying he was at present completely engaged, and could take no new patients. But when she informed him that she did not desire his attendance, and only wished to communicate something which might help to clear up the mystery of the late premature deaths, he stopped and lent a patient ear. She told him

that, on the previous night, having occasion to leave her house, in order to visit a sick neighbour who lay upon a lonely death-bed, in the second flat below her own garret, she took a lamp in her hand, that she might the better find her way down. As she descended the stair, which she described as a turnpike, or spiral one, she heard a low and inexpressibly doleful moan, as if proceeding from the house of her neighbour-such a moan, she said, as she had never heard proceed from any of the numerous death-beds it had been her lot to attend. She hastened faster down the stair than her limbs were well able to carry her, under the idea that her friend was undergoing some severe suffering, which she might be able to alleviate. Before, however, she had reached the first landing-place, a noise, as of footsteps, arose from the house of pain, and caused her apprehend that all was not right in a house which she knew no one ever visited in that time of desolation, but herself. She quickened her pace still more than before, and soon reached the landing-place at her neighbour's door. Something, as she expressed it, seeming to swoof down the stairs, like the noise of a full garment brushing the walls of a narrow passage, she drew in the lamp, and, looking down beyond it, saw what she conceived to be the dark drapery of the back of a tall human figure loosely clad, moving, or rather gliding, out of sight, and in a moment gone. So uncertain was she at first of the reality of what she saw, that she believed it to be the shadow of the central pile of the stair gliding downwards as she brought round the light; but the state of matters in the inside of the house soon convinced her, to her horror, that it must have been something more dreadful and real -the unfortunate woman being dead; though as yet it was three days till the time when, according to the old rules of the disease, she might have lived or died. The physician heard this story with astonishment; but as it only informed his mind, which was not free from superstition, that the whole matter was becoming more and more mysterious, he drew no conclusions from it, but simply observing, with a professional shake of the head, that all was not right in the town, went upon his way.

The old woman, who, of course, could not be expected to let so good a subject of gossip and wonderment lie idle in her mind, like the guinea kept by the Vicar of Wakefield's daughters, forthwith proceeded to dissipate it abroad among her neighbours, who soon (to follow out the idea of the coin) reduced it into still larger and coarser pieces, and paid it away, in that exaggerated form, to a wider circle of neighbours, by whom it was speedily dispersed in various shapes over the whole town. The popular mind, like the ear of a sick man, being then peculiarly sensitive, received the intelligence with a degree of alarm, such as the news of a lost battle has not always occa

sioned amongst a people: and as the atmosphere is best calculated for the conveyance of sound during the time of frost, so did the air of the plague seem peculiarly well fitted for the propagation of this fearful report. The whole of the people were impressed, on hearing the story, with a feeling of undefined awe, mixed with horror. The back of a tall figure, in dark long clothes, seen but for a moment! There was a picturesque indistinctness in the description, which left room for the imagination; taken in conjunction, too, with the moan heard at first by the old woman on the stair, and the demise of the sick woman at the very time, it was truly startling. To add to the panic, a report arose next day, that the figure had been seen on the preceding evening, by different persons, flitting about various stairs and alleys, always in the shade, and disappearing immediately after being first perceived. An idea began to prevail that it was the image of Death-Death, who had thus come in his impersonated form, to a city which seemed to have been placed so peculiarly under his dominion, in order to execute his office with the greater promptitude. It was thought-if so fantastic a dream may be assigned to the thinking faculty-that the grand destroyer, who, in ordinary times, is invisible, might, perhaps, have the power of rendering himself palpa ble to the sight in cases where he approached his victims, under circumstances of peculiar horror; and this wild imagination was the more fearful, inasmuch as it was supposed that, with the increase of the mortality, he would become more and more distinctly visible, till, perhaps, after having despatched all, he would burst forth in open triumph, and roam at large throughout a city of desolation.

It happened, on the second day after the rise of this popular fancy, that an armed ship, of a very singular construction, and manned by a crew of strangely foreign-looking men, entered Leith harbour. It was a Barbary rover; but the crew showed no intention of hostility to the town of Leith, though at the present pass it would have fallen an easy prey to their arms, being quite as much afflicted with the pestilence as its metropolitan neighbour. A detachment of the crew, comprising one who appeared to be their commander, immediately landed, and proceeded to Edinburgh, which they did not scruple to enter. They inquired for the provost, and, on being conducted to the presence of that dignitary, their chief disclosed their purpose of thus visiting Edinburgh, which was the useful one of supplying it, in its present distress, with a cargo of drugs, approved in the East for their efficacy against the plague, and a few men who could undertake to administer them properly to the sick. The provost heard this intelligence with overflowing eyes; for, besides the anxiety he felt about the welfare of the city, he was especially interested in the health of his daughter, and only child, who happened to be involved in the