Highborn geniuses, they tell me, have their idle
visions as well as we working-men; and Oxford has seen of late years as
wild Icarias conceived as ever were fathered by a red Republic. For,
indeed, we have the same flesh and blood, the same God to teach us, the
same devil to mislead us, whether we choose to believe it or not. But there
were excuses for me. We Londoners are not accustomed from our youth to the
poems of a great democratic genius, as the Scotchmen are to their glorious
Burns. We have no chance of such an early acquaintance with poetic art
as that which enabled John Bethune, one of the great unrepresented--the
starving Scotch day-labourer, breaking stones upon the parish roads, to
write at the age of seventeen such words as these:--
Hail, hallow'd evening! sacred hour to me!
Thy clouds of grey, thy vocal melody,
Thy dreamy silence oft to me have brought
A sweet exchange from toil to peaceful thought.
Ye purple heavens! how often has my eye,
Wearied with its long gaze on drudgery,
Look'd up and found refreshment in the hues
That gild thy vest with colouring profuse!
O, evening grey! how oft have I admired
Thy airy tapestry, whose radiance fired
The glowing minstrels of the olden time,
Until their very souls flow'd forth in rhyme.
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