LINES WRITTEN ON VISITING A SCENE IN ARGYLESHIRE.

  At the silence of twilight’s contemplative hour,
    I have mused in a sorrowful mood,
  On the wind-shaken weeds that embosom the bower,
    Where the home of my forefathers stood. 
  All ruin’d and wild is their roofless abode,
  And lonely the dark raven’s sheltering tree: 
  And travell’d by few is the grass-cover’d road,
  Where the hunter of deer and the warrior trode
    To his hills that encircle the sea.

  Yet wandering I found on my ruinous walk,
    By the dial-stone aged and green,
  One rose of the wilderness left on its stalk,
    To mark where a garden had been. 
  Like a brotherless hermit, the last of its race,
    All wild in the silence of nature, it drew,
  From each wandering sun-beam, a lonely embrace
  For the night-weed and thorn overshadow’d the place,
    Where the flower of my forefathers grew.

  Sweet bud of the wilderness! emblem of all
    That remains in this desolate heart! 
  The fabric of bliss to its centre may fall,
    But patience shall never depart! 
  Though the wilds of enchantment, all vernal and bright,
    In the days of delusion by fancy combined
  With the vanishing phantoms of love and delight,
  Abandon my soul, like a dream of the night,
    And leave but a desert behind.

  Be hush’d, my dark spirit!  For wisdom condemns
    When the faint and the feeble deplore;
  Be strong as the rock of the ocean that stems
    A thousand wild waves on the shore! 
  Through the perils of chance, and the scowl of disdain,
    May thy front be unalter’d, thy courage elate! 
  Yea! even the name I have worshipp’d in vain
  Shall awake not the sigh of remembrance again: 
    To bear is to conquer our fate.

Of a similar description are his “Lines on revisiting a Scottish River."[6]

    [6] See MIRROR, No. 257.

Mr. Campbell contributes but little to the pages of the New Monthly Magazine:  still, what he writes is excellent, and as we uniformly transfer his pieces to the Mirror, we need not recapitulate them.  The fame of Campbell, however, rests on his early productions, which, though not numerous, are so correct, and have been so fastidiously revised, that while they remain as standards of purity in the English tongue, they sufficiently explain why their author’s compositions are so limited in number, “since he who wrote so correctly could not be expected to write much.”  His Poetical pieces have lately been collected, and published in two elegant library volumes, with a portrait esteemed as an extremely good likeness.