n life and nature, none so dear to his eyes
as the golden grain, ebbing like tide of sea before a close long line of
glancing sickles; no sound so sweet as--rising up into the pure
harvest-air, frost-touched though sunny--beneath the shade of
hedgerow-tree, after their mid-day meal, the song of the jolly reapers.
But are not his pictures sometimes too crowded? No. For there lies the
power of the pen over the pencil. The pencil can do much, the pen
everything; the Painter is imprisoned within a few feet of canvass, the
Poet commands the horizon with an eye that circumnavigates the globe;
even that glorious pageant, a painted Panorama, is circumscribed by
bounds, over which imagination, feeling them all too narrow, is uneasy
till she soars; but the Poet's Panorama is commensurate with the soul's
desires, and may include the Universe.

This Poem reads as if it had been written during the "dewy hour of
prime." Allan must be an early riser. But, if not so now, some forty
years ago he was up every morning with the lark,

"Walking to labour by that cheerful song,"

away up the Nith, through the Dalswinton woods; or, for anything we know
to the contrary, intersecting with stone-walls, that wanted not their
scientific coping, the green pastures of Sanquhar. Now he is familiar
with Chantrey's form-full statues; then, with the shapeless cairn on the
moor, the rude headstone on the martyr's grave. And thus it is that the
present has given him power over the past--that a certain grace and
delicacy, inspired by the pursuits of his prime, blend with the creative
dreams that are peopled with the lights and shadows of his youth--that
the spirit of the old ballad breathes still in its strong simplicity
through the composition of his "New Poem"--and that art is seen
harmoniously blending there with nature.

We have said already that we delight in the story; for it belongs to an
"order of _fables_ grey," which has been ever dear to Poets. Poets have
ever loved to bring into the pleasant places and paths of lowly life,
persons (we eschew all manner of _personages_ and _heroes_ and
_heroines_, especially with the epithet "_our_" prefixed) whose native
lot lay in a higher sphere: for they felt that by such contrast, natural
though rare, a beautiful light was mutually reflected from each
condition, and that sacred revelations were thereby made of human
character, of which all that is pure and profound appertains equally to
all estates