THE MAGIC OF THE HEATHER. 



ering echo-strains from a far-away distance, the music 

 of those sweet hame-fireside hours that will "never 

 come again?" 



Or is it a power more mystic than this artless 

 sympathy of brotherhood, which is the universal heri- 

 tage of the human heart? Is it, rather, some spell of 

 deep human feeling that, like a wailing ghost, haunts 

 those bleak Scottish hills the historic plaintiveness of 

 Covenanter flight and persecution that wraps their 

 crags in fascinating gloom and still leaves upon them 

 spirit-prints of martyr bloodshed? Is it those unfor- 

 gotten scenes of fraternal strife when the restless 

 clansmen of early Caledonia, with the seething vigor 

 of their untutored mountain life in their veins, stormy 

 fire in their eyes and in their hearts stormy hatred, 

 hunted each other through those Highland glens and 

 over their rocky peaks, while the slogan rudely woke 

 the low nature-music of the Highland calm and 

 thrilled the succeeding silence with voiceless portents 

 of evil fate? And is it that, to the sympathetic soul, 

 come the dream-voices of those restless stern departed, 

 who from out the shadows of the beyond lonesomely 

 wander back to their loved Highland home, bringing 

 again that grim ghostly message to the shrinking 

 Hamlet, "I could a tale unfold?" Is it the patron 

 spirit of poetic genius which has immortalized their 

 rugged solitude the atmosphere of romance and wild 

 story that so entrancingly wanders amidst it? Or is 

 it, perchance, the spiritual interflowing of all these 

 crude human and poetic emotions, drifting throughout 

 the quiet nature-enchantment like a fleecy scattering, 

 eternally unfading silver mist? 



i37 



