DEATH OF ROSS. 239 



lyrical passion and dramatic sympathy, and his imagin- 

 ation, though powerful, was cold. His ear, too, may 

 have been naturally better fitted to the modulation of 

 prose than of verse. It is bootless to speculate on the 

 subject. The army of the Muses is like that of Gideon. 

 All who are fearful or afraid, all who do not serve for 

 life or for death, not only may, but must quit it ; and 

 Miller was critic enough to know the 'intolerable severity ' 

 of Apollo. Some of our most eminent writers, Mr 

 Carlyle and Mr Ruskin for instance, impatient of the 

 deluges of mediocre poetry which flood our literary 

 thoroughfares, and angry that attention should be 

 diverted by anything short of transcendent excellence 

 from the wealth of choicest song with which the liter- 

 ature of England is already stored, would maintain that, 

 in deliberately abandoning verse, amid the acclamations 

 which greeted his earliest efforts, Hugh Miller presented 

 an example which specially deserves to be followed, and 

 gave one of the noblest proofs afforded by his career of 

 sterling ability and massive sense. Mrs Miller informs 

 me that his relinquish nient of the lyre was but provi- 

 sional ; and that it was his intention to resume verse 

 in a poem to be entitled ' The Leper.' It will be recol- 

 lected that, among the projects which we saw him form, 

 was one for the composition of a poem thus named. 



From the ideal woe of perceiving for the first time 

 that he stood at an immeasurable distance below the 

 great masters of English poetry, he was recalled to the 

 hard reality of grief by the intelligence that his Uncle 

 James had died, and, on proceeding to Cromarty, in 

 consequence of this intelligence, he learned that William 

 Ross also was no more. Uncle James, as we well know, 

 had been as a father to him ; or rather as one among 

 ten thousand fathers ; for, if the affection with which he 



