ore a poor, shabby imitation of modern
English--itself a weaker language in sound, however enriched in
words, since the days of Shakspere, when it was far more like Scotch
in its utterance than it is now.

My mother-tongue, how sweet thy tone!
How near to good allied!
Were even my heart of steel or stone,
Thou wouldst drive out the pride.

So sings Klaus Groth, in and concerning his own Plattdeutsch--so
nearly akin to the English.

To a poet especially is it an inestimable advantage to be able to
employ such a language for his purposes. Not only was it the speech
of his childhood, when he saw everything with fresh, true eyes, but
it is itself a child-speech; and the child way of saying must always
lie nearer the child way of seeing, which is the poetic way.
Therefore, as the poetic faculty was now slowly asserting itself in
Donal, it was of vast importance that he should know what the genius
of Scotland had been able to do with his homely mother-tongue, for
through that tongue alone, could what poetry he had in him have
thoroughly fair play, and in turn do its best towards his
development--which is the first and greatest use of poetry. It is a
ruinous misjudgment--too contemptible to be asserted, but not too
contemptible to be acted upon, that the end of poetry is
publication. Its true end is to help first the man who makes it
along the path to the truth: help for other people may or may not be
in it; that, if it become a question at all, must be an after one.
To the man who has it, the gift is invaluable; and, in proportion
as it helps him to be a better man, it is of value to the whole
world; but it may, in itself, be so nearly worthless, that the
publishing of it would be more for harm than good. Ask any one who
has had to perform the unenviable duty of editor to a magazine: he
will corroborate what I say--that the quantity of verse good enough
to be its own reward, but without the smallest claim to be uttered
to the world, is enormous.

Not yet, however, had Donal written a single stanza. A line, or at
most two, would now and then come into his head with a buzz, like a
wandering honey-bee that had mistaken its hive--generally in the
shape of a humorous malediction on Hornie--but that was all.

In the mean time Gibbie slept and waked and slept again, night after
night--with the loveliest days between, at the cottage on Glashgar.
The morning after his arrival, the first thing he was aware of was
Janet'