The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

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The Highland Monthly.
was being transformed. He had become, to quote the great
reflective poet of the century
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
and of all that we behold
—
And mountains ;
From this green earth : of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both ^vhat \\e half create
And what perceive.
Or, as Hogg has expressed it in his own simple, beautiful
language :
—
The bard, in Ettrick's mountains green,
In Nature's bosom nursed had been ;
And oft had marked, in forest lone.
Her beauties on her mountain throne
Had seen her deck the wild wood tree.
And star with snowy gems the lea,
In loveliest colours paint the plain.
And sow the moor with purple grain ;
By golden mead and mountain sheer,
Had viewed the Ettrick winding clear,
When shadowing flocks of purest snow
Seemed grazing in the world below.
But it was not the ever-changing face of nature that
Hogg was making himself familiar with at this time. He
was becoming equally acquainted with each shade of the
many-coloured life of the Border people. No one, indeed^
.can read his tales, rough and unpolished as is their style,
but must feel their truthfulness, their vigour, and their
realism. The cause, indeed, of the real strength of the
best of them, such as those contained in the Shepherd's
Calendar, and the Brownie of Bodsbeck, he has himself
explained. They are, in fact, transcripts of the life he saw
around him.
" The greater part of these tales were written,"
he says in his autobiography, " in early life, when I was
serving as a shepherd lad among the mountains ;
;
and
on
looking over them, I saw well enough there was a blunt
rusticity about them, but liked them better for it, and altered
nothing." The instinct of Hogg in this respect was superior