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Christopher North dead! The old man eloquent, dumb henceforth and for aye! Consigned to the dishonours of the grave yet another of the old familiar faces! O passing bell, too often of late nave we heard thee ring out the old—telling how one generation passeth away—how the strong man boweth down, and how Time changeth his countenance, and Death takes him away—even Death the Skeleton, and Time the Shadow.
"I sometimes wunner," said once the Shepherd of the Noctes, speaking the thoughts of a higher than himself (for what is Hogg but for Wilson, except in a few fragments of verse?)—"I sometimes wunner how the warld will gang on when I'm dead. It's no vanity, or ony notion that I gar the wheels o' the warld wark, that makes me think sae, but just an incapacity to separate my life frae the rest o' creation. Suns settin' and risin', and me no there to glower! Birds singin', the mavis in the wood, and the laverock in the lift, and me no there to list—list—listen! … Some ane lovelier than the lave, singin' ane o' my ain sangs, and me in the unhearin' grave!"
Never lived there, surely, a man more keenly susceptible to emotions of this kind, and more skilled in expressing their power, in tones that go straight to the heart of others, than was the largely-gifted John Wilson. Few have equalled him in the mastery, at will, of human feelings—in opening, by a touch of his rod, the sacred source of sympathetic tears. And he too is gone; whose hand was so familiar with our heartstrings. Twenty, thirty years ago, he played at being a very aged man; twenty years passed on, and the play was no longer a jest—thirty years, and it was no more a make-believe;—and at last we read in the common obituary of the daily press, on such a day, and in his sixty-ninth year, the name of John Wilson.
What a fervid life was his—what a luxuriant nature—how richly endowed, how broadly developed, how finely strung! We love to think of him in what he calls "bold, beautiful boyhood"—in the "stormy sunshine" of his tumultuous youth—when first he wandered from the conventionalities of town life into the strange world of Nature—when, "like a roe,"
He bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led:—
when
The sounding cataract
Haunted him like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms,
were to him surcharged with almost "aching joys" and "dizzy raptures." Mr. de Quincey says, in his "Lake Reminiscences" (bearing date 1834),
