But he must go after all.  The editor’s den at Leeds is not the place for lungs bred on Perthshire breezes; and work rises before him, huger and heavier as he goes on, till he drops under the ever-increasing load.  He will not believe it at first.  In sweet childlike playful letters, he tells his mother that it is nothing.  It has done him good—­“opened the grave before his eyes, and taught him to think of death.”  “He trusts that he has not borne this, and suffered, and thought in vain.”  This too, he hopes, is to be a fresh lesson-page of experience for his work.  Alas! a few months more of bitter suffering, and of generous kindness and love from all around him—­and it is over with him at the age of twenty-three.  Shall we regret him?—­shall we not rather believe that God knew best; and considering the unhealthy moral atmosphere of the second-class press, and the strange confused ways into which old ultra-Radicalism, finding itself too narrow for the new problems of the day, has stumbled and floundered during the last fifteen years, believe that he might have been a worse man had he been a longer-lived one, and thank heaven that “the righteous is taken away from the evil to come?”

As it is, he ends as he began.  The first poem in his book is “The Ha’ Bible;” and the last, written a few days before his death, is still the death-song of a man—­without fear, without repining, without boasting, blessing and loving the earth which he leaves, yet with a clear joyful eye upwards and outwards and homewards.  And so ends his little epic, as we called it.  May Scotland see many such another!

The actual poetic value of his verses is not first-rate by any means.  He is far inferior to Burns in range of subject, as he is in humour and pathos.  Indeed, there is very little of these latter qualities in him anywhere—­rather playfulness, flashes of childlike fun, as in “The Provost,” and “Bonnie Bessie Lee.”  But he has attained a mastery over English, a simplicity and quiet which Burns never did; and also, we need not say, a moral purity.  His “Poems illustrative of the Scotch peasantry” are charming throughout—­alive and bright with touches of real humanity, and sympathy with characters apparently antipodal to his own.

His more earnest poems are somewhat tainted with that cardinal fault of his school, of which he steered so clear in prose—­fine words; yet he never, like the Corn-Law Rhymer, falls a cursing.  He is evidently not a good hater even of “priests and kings, and aristocrats, and superstition;” or perhaps he worked all that froth safely over and off in debating-club speeches and leading articles, and left us, in these poems, the genuine metheglin of his inner heart, sweet, clear, and strong; for there is no form of lovable or right thing which this man has come across, which he does not seem to have appreciated.  Besides pure love and the beauties of nature—­those on which every man of poetic power, and a great many of none, as a matter of course, have a word to say—­he can feel for and with the drunken beggar, and the warriors of the ruined manor-house, and the monks of the abbey, and the old mailed Normans with their “priest with cross and counted beads in the little Saxon chapel”—­things which a Radical editor might have been excused for passing by with a sneer.