A

JOHN INGLIS,

UTHOR of the following poem, is a native of the town of Hawick, having been born there in 1857. He was trained to the frame-work knitting, at which he continued for twelve years, when he went into one of the tweed factories. In 1872 he removed to America, where he succeeded well, but his heart was so strongly attached to the wild and historic scenery of his much-loved Teviotdale, that he returned home in 1874. In 1879 he published a volume entitled "Borderland." The work was a success, and it is but right to mention that the poet handed over the profits as a gift to the building fund of St John's Church, Hawick, then in course of erection. He sings with much force and vigour the praises of his native vale.

BORDERLAND.

They tell of merry England-its palaces and halls,

Which tower above its leafy woods, their old embattled walls; But, oh, give me the shielings where the heath and thistles wave O'er the rugged hero's cairn and the gentle martyr's grave! There playful zephyrs lightly waft fresh fragrance from the fell, And laverocks 'mid the fleecy cloud their lays triumphant swell, To charm the Scottish maidens, till in song their voices blend Round the cozy cottage homes of the bonny Borderland.

When Winter, in his hoary robe, haunts mountain sides and groves,

And Boreas, with an angry howl, through naked woodland roves,

There's joy within the shieling of the blithesome Border wight, By his bonnie blazing fire, when daylight dies in night.

As he leans back in his settle, he gazes with delight

To the joist where hangs the claymore, with basket hilt so bright,
That was wielded by his sires, who died but would not bend`
To sacrifice the freedom of the bonnie Borderland.

In fields where noble Wallace led they bravely bore the brunt,
When fortune's tide seemed ebbing, they still kept form and

front,

Till fell the great-souled hero, in the noontide of his fame,
And left stern Scotland weeping o'er the treachery and shame.

But Bruce's war-cry echoed with vengeance wild and high,
From Carrick's frowning turrets proud Edward to defy;
Then rushed the belted yeomen, with spear and sweeping brand,
From the cozy cottage homes of the bonnie Borderland.

Then wild the cry of battle rose, and wide the carnage spread, While lunged each gleaming weapon, and on with death they sped,

Shouting loud in triumph as they trod the crimson'd plain, When the flowery earth was sodden with the hot blood of the slain.

But still the conflict deepened with each continuous shock,
Till England's proudest squadron in wild confusion broke;
The fury of the onset no foemen could withstand,

When they charged for Bruce and Freedom, and the bonnie
Borderland.

In days of persecution, when the tramp of armed men

Made them seek the dark seclusion of the deep and lonesome glen,

There to suffer cold and hunger without one fret or frown,

And at last pour forth their life-blood for the martyr's fadeless

crown,

Whence came these martyred preachers, the holy and the brave, Who suffered in the woodland, the moorland, and the cave,

For their worship, pure and simple, which no despot e'er could rend

From the cozy cottage homes of the bonnie Borderland?

Or whence the bards and minstrels who sang in days gone by
The strain that's ever ringing, the song that ne'er must die?
They touch the sympathetic chord, and noble thoughts impart ;
They swell, in cottage and in hall, each patriotic heart;
They charm the lonely bushman, in his cabin far away;
They nerve the soldier in the van in danger's darkest day;
They build a mighty pillar, which Time shall e'en defend,
That it may tell who lived and loved the bonnie Borderland.
Where joy is ever springing, oh, may it never cease
To be the hallowed resting-place of piety and peace!
There at eve the toiling peasant can read the Word of God,
And teach the children of his care Salvation's blissful road.
Thus they grow to men and maidens, in beauty and in might,
With virtue for their guiding star to tread the world aright,
Clinging fast to truth and justice, that blessings may descend
On the cozy cottage homes of the bonnie Borderland,

A

WALTER C. SMITH,

D.D.

RECENTLY-DECEASED, and a truly great and original poet, has said that "Labour, Art, Worship, Love, these make man's life;" and that the good and gifted Thomas Aird was right when he said so, the life and the rich, peculiar poetry of Dr Walter C. Smith most unmistakably prove.

This gifted divine, and pleasing and prolific poet, was born in Aberdeen, on 5th December, 1824, and was educated at the Grammar School there, under Dr Mellom. At the early age of thirteen he was sent to Marischal College, and was so apt and diligent a scholar that he graduated at seventeen. Foolishly then as he himself afterwards thought--he went to Edinburgh, uncertain what course of life to follow; but two years afterwards (at the Disruption of the Church of Scotland) he went to study divinity in the new Free Church College; and, on Christmas day, 1850, was ordained minister of the Free (Scotch) Church in Chadwell Street, Islington, London. With a delightful naïvete, which makes one smile, he writes regarding his sojourn there-"The church was a small charge, and did not grow larger, so I resigned and returned to Scotland in 1858." He was then chosen minister of Orwell, in Kinross-shire, “having about the same time," as he touchingly writes, "married my late beloved wife, Agnes Monteith." Here he remained for three years, his poetic sympathies being doubtless in the meantime nursed among the breezy braes and fine undulating heights around, and in shadow of the green, though bolder mountain range of the Ochils; and here too, by the bright and ever-surging cascades of the North Quiech, and on the gentle margin of sweet Lochleven, with its many stirring historic memories, we cannot doubt but that his Muse was occasionally trying her wings,

and preparing for those lofty and well-sustained flights into the regions of song which she has so frequently taken since.

The Free Roxburgh Church, Edinburgh, having given him a call, he accepted it and laboured there for three years, when he was called to the Free Tron Church, Glasgow, and remained there till five years ago, when he returned once more to Edinburgh as minister of the Free High Church, and where, with a still widening popularity, he at present labours.

Not only in the large body to which he belongs, but among all the Churches of Scotland, there is no name which is better known, or is a greater power, than that of Dr W. C. Smith; and his masterly sermon, "The Modern Sadducee," published in 1874, shows that he is more than a match for our most celebrated scientists when, from infidel positions, they seek to assail the scriptures of truth, and the hopes of immortality, and none of them all ever reasoned more logically, or uttered anything more poetically eloquent than when he says "I care not very much though it should be proved that grass and flower, fish and insect, bird on the wing, and steer browsing on the meadow, and even the body of man himself, sprang at first from the lumpish clay, or the quivering waters. Certainly it has not yet been proved. There is not one solid fact of this kind established to be the stepping-stone for science across the great mystery of life; and I do object, and I think I am entitled to object, when I am called to launch forth into the blank and sterile region, dark as the spaces that lie between the stars, and to believe that matter of itself is capable of producing all the phenomena of life, not in virtue of any facts that lead to such a conclusion, but simply at the bidding of the scientific imagination. To unsettle so old a faith at the bidding of a mere fancy, does appear to me a somewhat wanton procedure, quite unlike the humility and patience of the true philosopher." Equally grand

is the following passage, which has quite the poetic glow and the eloquent ring-"Science may babble about vibrations and pulsations and nerve-waves and folds of the brain; and all these, for aught I know, may have something to do with thought as its organs and instruments. But love, and reason, and poetry, and devotion are not mere vibrations of any substance; neither are they nitrogen and carbon, nor anything you can see with cunning glass, or test with subtlest drop. If ever man was powerless, in the face of an utter mystery, it is the man of mere science when he has to do with spirit. His scalpels, his microscopes, his vials, his wires, his tests, touch everything but thought; his very processes of reasoning fail him in this province, and he seems unable to see that he may break the Sphinx in pieces, and grind it to powder, without in the least explaining its mystery to us." The dullest reader will at once see that the man who could write in a style like this must have been a poet, whether he had ever written in verse or no. A poet, however, Dr Smith is, and was, in the ordinary sense of the term, before he wrote so eloquently in defence of the truths of religion.

In 1867, when he had reached the mature age of thirty-three years, he published "Hymns of Christ and the Christian Life;" and about the same time he also published a volume of poetry, under the name of "Orwell." Although issued anonymously, he, we believe, has avowed himself the author of "Olrig Grange" (1872), "Borland Hall" (1874), "Hilda among the Broken Gods" (1878), and "Raban: or Life Splinters" (1881).

The first thing which strikes the reader of Dr. Smith's poetry is its thorough originality of style, and also of mere expression, and we might add, likewise, in the construction or mechanism of the verse. We do not think, however, that in the form of verse which he has generally adopted, he has been altogether happy; and wide though his fame has already