seem to live only to keep up the struggle between truth and deception; and you poets are everlastingly dreaming visions, that bear about as much likeness to what you meet with on earth, as the portraits of an itinerant painter do to his sitters.'

'Ah, here is a book, not entirely unfashionable,' said Frank, as he picked up a volume from the table on which his elbow was resting. 'Cunningham's Life of Burns, is n't it?

"Yes,' answered Frank.

'Father, knowing my love for Burns, purchased it for me the other day. I have renewed my fondness for the 'ploughman-poet,' by reading it.'

'I wonder if any one deifies Burns as I do,' said Frank, as he turned over the pages.

'I suspect,' returned Mary, 'that there is quite as much of a GreIn that temple, cian temple about my heart, as thee can lay claim to. on a niche, shrouded in glory, stands most conspicuously the beau ideal of a statue of Robert Burns.'

'Good!' said Frank; and borrowing your idea, I should say my heart is a complete Pantheon, and in it, on the highest range of niches, stand the poets-the gray-haired sires' of the olden time, when every grove was sanctified by poësy, and those men of after years, who have lived near our own day. In the language of Wordsworth :

'Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,
The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth, and pure delight, by heavenly lays.'

And, Miss Mary, we agree in the homage that we render to him, who

'walked in glory and in joy,

Following his plough upon the mountain-side.'

I have sometimes thought it would be an excellent criterion whereby to judge of the excellence of a heart, to submit it to the influence of Burns' life and poetry. If a tear was not shed to the memory of the and if the other did not awaken a rapid succession of all the feelings that stir the soul, that heart would not have much to interest me.'

one,

Judged of by such a criterion, I should be admirable,' said Mary, laughingly.

this way I judge of the relative greatness of minds. Now Burns, with ordinary subjects, has charmed the world. Look at his heroines, milk-maids and gleaners, though they are, and point me to the page of any other poet, where I can find their superiors. Listen, while I read a moment:

'Sae fair her hair, sae bent her brow,

Sae bonnie blue her een, my dearie,
Sae white her teeth, sae sweet her mou,

The mair I look, she's mair my dearie.'
And again :

'She's fresh as the morning, the fairest in May;
She's sweet as the evening amang the new hay;
As blythe and as artless as lambs on the lea,
And dear to my heart as the light to my ee.'

And here is a verse from Mary Morison, one of the sweetest things that genius ever sent down to immortality; listen to her lover:

'Yestreen, when to the trembling string,

The dance gaed through the lighted ha',
To thee my fancy took its wing,

I sat, but neither heard nor saw:
Tho' this was fair, and that was braw,

And yon the toast of a' the town,
I sighed, and said amang them a',

Ye are no Mary Morison.'

Here is one more verse :

"As in the bosom of the stream,

The moonbeam dwells at dewy e'en,
So trembling pure was faithful love,
Within the breast of bonnie Jean.'

Now, for nature, for the force and simplicity of truth, where will you find any thing superior to what I have read, without any effort at selection ? Byron's heroines are very fine, but Burns' are lovely. Think of that splendid abstraction of Byron's, so often quoted :

"She walks in beauty like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best in dark and bright,

Meet in her aspect and her eyes.'

I say, take this description, and compare it with :

'Sae fair her hair, sae bent her brow,

Sae bonnie blue her e'en, my dearie,
Sae white her teeth, sae sweet her mou',

The mair I look, she's mair my dearie,'

and you can feel the difference between the cold and brilliant abstraction of Byron, and the flesh-and-blood being of Burns. The one is cold, like moonlight on frost-work; the other is warm as the light of love on the eye of beauty. But I forget that I am not talking with one who differs from me in opinion.'

* As to splendor and greatness, I think Burns inferior to many poets, but he has a way of taking one's heart, that is only his,' said Mary.

'When I speak of Burns' greatness, I do not mean to speak of him in comparison with Milton; I only say, that he was the greatest poet that ever lived, under similar circumstances. He had not the education, he had not the ten thousand intellectualizing influences; he had not the soul-exalting knowledge of all that genius had done before him, that others have had. Shakspeare himself, the prince of poets, confined to the banks of Ayr, would not have conversed in mightier cadences than those which fell from the charmed lips of Burns. Byron would not have seen half as many beauties, in Burns' situation. And now, Miss Mary, will you pretend to measure your idolatry of the god-like intellect of Burns, with mine?'

'I fear I shall have to rank second. I cannot help thinking of the infirmities of the man, while I admire the greatness of the poet.' It would not do,' said Frank, for me to palliate what you charitably call his infirmities. I think that Burns' vices were not remarkably many. I fear that if you stretch us on the Procrustean bed, there will be but few of the proper size.'

'I cannot but acknowledge that I feel a marvellous inclination to overlook the short-comings of such a man as Burns,' returned Mary; ' and like Hannah More, I think it a great pity, that men of genius should be so bad, that one will not have their agreeable company in heaven.'

'You may depend upon it, Miss Mary, that Burns was not so bloated by his vices, as to be unable to get in at the straight and narrow gate.' You may see him yet in paradise.'

And Mary Campbell, too,' added Mary. 'What a meeting her last with Burns was! I know of no scene more touching to one's feelings.'

RURAL CEMETERIES.

'WIND, gentle evergreen, to form a shade
Around the tomb where Sophocles is laid;
Sweet Ivy wind thy boughs, and intertwine
With blushing roses, and the clustering vine;
So shall thy boughs, with lasting honors hung,
Prove grateful emblems of the lays he sung.'

THERE is a pleasure in looking upon the grave as a place of rest. But in the heart of cities, we fancy something in their sepulchres, repugnant to the idea of a sweet repose. There the dead may lie down amid a profusion of sculpture, amid monuments seen like the tomb of Bianor in the distance, erected by vanity, and never moistened by a tear. But there is a voice without, which baffles all their quietude, and drowns the silent eloquence of the grave. While the multitude are hurrying through crowded thoroughfares, and the hum of men and murmurs of a great mart are fretting like waves against the sepulchre, it seems not like that wished-for mansion, where 'the weary are at rest.'

Methinks I could emulate the example of the Turk, if not in his ideas of a blind fatality, at least in a devotion which teaches him not to violate the grave. For, indulging the stately reserve of his nature, he holds converse with the shades of his ancestors, reposing beneath the mourning cypress, in the midst of some vast necropolis.

The care of the dead is a beautiful trait in any nation, and has its origin in the unadulterated wells of the heart. It is a redeeming feature in the otherwise stern and repulsive character of the American savage. He loves his country, not only for its solitudes, and majestic forests, which accord so well with his 'soul's sadness,' and whence, as from a temple, his prayers may go up to the Great Spirit, but he loves it more ardently, for in it the bones of his dead repose. He regards their sepulchres with a veneration of which more civilized nations know nothing, and they are his last entrenchment in the day of battle. And when the arts of the white man have at last prevailed, and he goes broken-hearted beyond the Great River,' thither his last lingering looks are cast. Generations may pass away, like the leaves of the forest; but when some of his posterity, retracing the steps of his exile, come to our seat of government to strike new treaties, again to be broken, they will turn, perhaps, many miles from the highway, and seeking out some tumulus in the wood, where the ashes of their tribe were deposited, pass many hours in silent lamentation. And is not the civilized man excelled in this respect by the savage? After unmitigated wrong and outrage, committed and to be committed, until their last remnant has vanished, would to God that he would learn this lesson from the vanquished! Who has not seen, in our larger towns, sacrilege frequently committed, for the sake of lucre ?—the abodes of the dead unblushingly rent open, bones cast out in a heterogeneous mass, and the whole place at last reduced to one common level? It might have been hoped, that the lust of gain would stop short of this; and to the honor