"

-Would I were now beneath that echoing roof! No lukewarm accents from my lips should flow; My heart would sing; and many a Sabbath day My steps should thither turn; or, wandering far In solitary paths, where wild flowers blow,

There would I bless His name who led me forth From death's dark vale, to walk amid these sweets; Who gives the bloom of health once more to glow Upon this cheek, and lights this languid eye."

It is not only in the sacred fane

That homage should be paid to the Most High;
There is a temple, one not made with hands,—
The vaulted firmament: Far in the woods,
Almost beyond the sound of city-chime,

At intervals heard through the breezeless air ;
When not the limberest leaf is seen to move,
Save where the linnet lights upon the spray;
When not a flowret bends its little stalk,

Save where the bee alights upon the bloom ;—

There, rapt in gratitude, in joy, and love,
The man of God will pass the Sabbath noon;
Silence his praise: his disembodied thoughts,
Loosed from the load of words, will high ascend
ond the empyrean.―

yet less pleasing at the heavenly throne,
e Sabbath service of the shepherd boy.
some lone glen, where every sound is lulled

To slumber, save the tinkling of the rill,

Or bleat of lamb, or hovering falcon's cry,

Stretched on the sward, he reads of Jesse's son ;
Or sheds a tear o'er him to Egypt sold,

And wonders why he weeps: the volume closed,

With thyme-sprig laid between the leaves, he sings The sacred lays, his weekly lesson, conned

With meikle care beneath the lowly roof,

Where humble lore is learnt, where humble worth

Pines unrewarded by a thankless state.
Thus reading, hymning, all alone, unseen,
The shepherd boy the Sabbath holy keeps,

Till on the heights he marks the straggling bands
Returning homeward from the house of prayer.
In peace they home resort. O blissful days!
When all men worship God as conscience wills
Far other times our fathers' grandsires knew,
A virtuous race, to godliness devote.

What though the sceptic's scorn hath dared to.
The record of their fame! What though the men
Of worldly minds have dared to stigmatize
The sister-cause, Religion and the Law,

With Superstition's name! yet, yet their deeds,
Their constancy in torture and in death,—
These on Tradition's tongue still live, these shall
On History's honest page be pictured bright
To latest times. Perhaps some bard, whose muse
Disdains the servile strain of Fashion's quire,
May celebrate their unambitious names.
With them each day was holy, every hour
They stood prepared to die, a people doomed

To death ;-old men, and youths, and simple maids.

With them each day was holy; but that morn
On which the angel said, See where the Lord
Was laid, joyous arose; to die that day

Was bliss. Long ere the dawn, by devious ways,
r hills, thro' woods, o'er dreary wastes, they sought
upland muirs, where rivers, there but brooks,
part to different seas: Fast by such brooks,
little glen is sometimes scooped, a plat

With green sward gay, and flowers that strangers seem
Amid the heathery wild, that all around
Fatigues the eye in solitudes like these,
Thy persecuted children, SCOTIA, foiled

A tyrant's and a bigot's bloody laws :

There, leaning on his spear, (one of the array,
Whose gleam, in former days, had scathed the rose
On England's banner, and had powerless struck
The infatuate monarch and his wavering host),
The lyart veteran heard the word of God
By Cameron thundered, or by Renwick poured
In gentle stream: then rose the song, the loud

Acclaim of praise; the wheeling plover ceased
Her plaint; the solitary place was glad,

And on the distant cairns the watcher's ear *
Caught doubtfully at times the breeze-borne n
But years more gloomy followed; and no r
The assembled people dared, in face of day.
To worship God, or even at the dead

Of night, save when the wintry storm raved 1.
And thunder-peals compelled the men of blood
To couch within their dens; then dauntlessly
The scattered few would meet, in some deep dell
By rocks o'er-canopied, to hear the voice,
Their faithful pastor's voice: He by the gleam
Of sheeted lightning oped the sacred book,
And words of comfort spake: Over their souls
His accents soothing came,-as to her young
The heathfowl's plumes, when, at the close of eve,
She gathers in, mournful, her brood dispersed

* Sentinels were placed on the surrounding hills, to give warning of the approach of the military.