My labor never flags; And what are its wages? A bed of straw, A shattered roof- and this naked floor - And a wall so blank my shadow I thank "Work-work-work! From weary chime to chime; Work-work-work! As prisoners work for crime! Band, and gusset, and seam, Seam, and gusset, and band, Till the heart is sick and the brain benumbed, As well as the weary hand! When the weather is warm and bright: While underneath the eaves The brooding swallows cling, As if to show me their sunny backs, And twit me with the spring. “O, but to breathe the breath Of the cowslip and primrose sweet, With the sky above my head, And the grass beneath my feet! To feel as I used to feel, “O, but for one short hour! A respite, however brief! No blessed leisure for love or hope, A little weeping would ease my heart- My tears must stop, for every drop With fingers weary and worn, - stitch stitch! In poverty, hunger, and dirt; And still with a voice of dolorous pitch- CLX.-MOSS-SIDE. [JOHN WILSON was born May 19, 1785, at Paisley, in Scotland, and died April 3, 1854. In 1812 he published a poem called The Isle of Palms, which won high, though not wide, admiration, for its tenderness of feeling and beauty of sentiment. In 1816 there appeared from his pen a volume containing The City of the Plague, a dramatic poem, and several miscellaneous pieces in verse. In 1820 he was appointed professor of moral phílosophy in the University of Edinburgh, succeeding Dr. Thomas Brown. In 1822 he published, anonymously, a volume called The Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, containing several stories and sketches illustrating the traits and manners of the rural population of Scotland. Many of these are very beautiful; and the volume at once attained a popularity which his poems had not se cured. A novel, in the same style, called The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay, was published by him in 1823. But his ablest and most characteristic productions are those which he wrote from time to time for Blackwood's (Edinburgh) Magazine. This periodical was started in 1817. Wilson, who had been residing in Edinburgh since 1815, became at once one of the principal contributors, and subsequently its editor. To no one writer so much as to him did the Magazine owe its peculiar character and brilliant reputation. The name of Christopher North, under which he wrote, became immediately world-renowned. A periodical journal afforded the appropriate sphere for the display of his various and versatile powers-his wit, his poetry, his eloquence, his love of nature, his riotous animal spirits, his love of fun, and his strong political prejudices. His intellectual powers were accompanied and enforced by the finest physical gifts. His form was cast in the noblest mould of manly beauty. He was a keen sportsman, and excelled in all athletic exercises. In his youth and early manhood, there was a dash of wildness and eccentricity about him, which increased the interest inspired by his brilliant genius. In the collected edition of his works, published in twelve volumes, since his death, his contributions to Blackwood's Magazine occupy ten of the volumes, under the titles of Noctes Ambrosianæ, in four volumes, Essays, Critical and Imaginative, in four volumes, and the Recreations of Christopher North, in two volumes. In these productions the genius of Wilson appears in its full strength-rich, exuberant, boundless, and overflowing. Wit the most dashing and reckless, poetry the most lavish, the most glowing eloquence, the finest descriptive power, the most genuine pathos and tenderness, combine to throw their attractions over his pages. His thoughts, images, and illustrations stream forth with the power and rapidity of a mountain torrent. He is remarkable especially for descriptive genius and critical skill. The characteristic features of Scottish scenery have never been delineated in verse with more true poetical feeling and quick sensibility than in the prose of Wilson. He is not a poet of the first class, but as a critic of poetry he has no superior. His principles of poetical criticism are philosophically correct; and they are applied under the guidance of the finest appreciative faculty. Moss-side is taken from the Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life.] GILBERT AINSLIE was a poor man; and he had been a poor man all the days of his life, which were not few, for his thin hair was now waxing gray. He had been born and bred on the small moorland farm which he now occupied; and he hoped to die there, as his father and grandfather had done before him, leaving a family just above the more bitter wants of this world. Labor, hard and unremitting, had been his lot in life; but although sometimes severely tried, he had never repined; and through all the mist and gloom, and even the storms, that had assailed him, he had lived on, from year to year, in that calm and resigned contentment, which unconsciously cheers the hearthstone of the blameless poor. With his own hands he had ploughed, sowed, and reaped his often scanty harvest, assisted, as they grew up, by three sons, who, even in boyhood, were happy to work along with their father in the fields. Out of doors or in, Gilbert Ainslie was never idle. The spade, the shears, the plough-shaft, the sickle, and the flail, all came readily to hands that grasped them well; and not a morsel of food was eaten under his roof, or a garment worn there, that was not honestly, severely, nobly earned. Gilbert Ainslie was a slave, but it was for them he loved with a sober and deep affection. The thraldom under which he lived God had imposed, and it only served to give his character a shade of silent gravity, but not austere; to make his smiles fewer, but more heart-felt; to calm his soul at grace before and after meals; and to kindle it in morning and evening prayer. There is no need to tell the character of the wife of such a man. Meek and thoughtful, yet gladsome and gay withal, her heaven was in her house; and her gentler and weaker hands helped to bar the door against want. Of ten children, that had been born to them, they had lost three; and as they had fed, clothed, and educated them respectably, so did they give them who died a respectable funeral. The living did not grudge to give up, for a while, some of their daily comforts for the sake of the dead, and bought, with the little sums which their industry had saved, decent mournings, worn on Sabbath, and then carefully laid by. Of the seven that survived, two sons were farm-servants in the neighborhood, while three daughters and two sons remained at home, growing, or grown up, a small, happy, hard-working household. Many cottages are there in Scotland like Moss-side, and many such humble and virtuous cottagers as were now beneath its roof of straw. The eye of the passing traveller may mark them, or mark them not, but they stand peacefully in thousands over all the land; and most beautiful do they make it, through all its wide valleys and narrow glens,—its low holms* encircled by the rocky walls of some bonny burn,† its green mounts elated with their little crowning groves of plane-trees, its yellow corn-fields, its bare pastoral hillsides, and all its heathy moors, on whose black bosom lie shining or concealed glades of excessive verdure, inhabited by flowers, and visited only by the far-flying bees. Moss-side was not beautiful to a careless or hasty eye; but when looked on and surveyed, it seemed a pleasant dwelling. Its roof, overgrown with grass and moss, was almost as green as the ground out of which its weather-stained walls appeared to grow. The moss behind it was separated from a little garden by a narrow slip of arable land, the dark color of which showed that it had been won from the wild by patient industry, and by patient industry retained. It required a bright, sunny day to make Moss-side fair; but then it was fair indeed; and when the little brown moorland birds were singing their short songs among the rushes and the heather, or a lark, perhaps lured thither by some green barley-field for its undisturbed nest, rose ringing all over the enlivened solitude, the little bleak farm smiled like the paradise of poverty, sad and affecting in its lone and extreme simplicity. The boys and girls had made some plots of flowers among the vegetables that the little garden supplied for their homely meals; pinks and carnations, brought from walled gardens of rich men, farther down in the cultivated strath, ‡ grew here with somewhat diminished lustre; a bright show of tulips had a strange beauty in the midst of that moorland; and the smell of roses mixed well with that of the clover, the beautiful fair clover that loves the soil and the air of Scotland, and gives the rich and balmy milk to the poor man's lips. In this cottage, Gilbert's youngest child, a girl about nine * Holm, a flat piece of land on the bank of a stream. + Bonny burn, pretty brook. Strath, a valley through which a stream runs. |