Then came the Silver Age of Song, the age in which we now live--and the song-singers were thieves still--stealing and robbing from them who had stolen and robbed of old; yet, how account you for this phenomenon--all parties remain richer than ever--and Nature, especially, after all this thieving and robbery, and piracy and plunder, many million times richer than the day on which she received her dowry,
and with "golden store" sufficient in its scatterings to enable all the sons of genius she will ever bear, to "set up for themselves" in poetry, accumulating capital upon capital, till each is a Croesus, rejoicing to lend it out without any other interest than cent per cent, paid in sighs, smiles, and tears, and without any other security than the promise of a quiet eye,
"That broods and sleeps on its own heart!"
Amongst the most famous thieves in our time have been Rob, James, and Allan. Burns never saw or heard a jewel or tune of a thought or a feeling, but he immediately made it his own--that is, stole it. He was too honest a man to refrain from such thefts. The thoughts and feelings--to whom by divine right did they belong? To Nature. But Burns beheld them "waif and stray," and in peril of being lost for ever. He seized then on those "snatches of old songs," wavering away into the same oblivion that lies on the graves of the nameless bards who first gave them being; and now, spiritually interfused with his own lays, they are secured against decay--and like them immortal. So hath the Shepherd stolen many of the Flowers of the Forest--whose beauty had breathed there ever since Flodden's fatal overthrow; but they had been long fading and pining away in the solitary places, wherein so many of their kindred had utterly disappeared, and beneath the restoring light of his genius their bloom and their balm were for ever renewed. But the thief of all thieves is the Nithsdale and Galloway thief--called by Sir Walter, most characteristically, "Honest Allan!" Thief and forger as he is--we often wonder why he is permitted to live. Many is the sweet stanza he has stolen from Time--that silly old carle who kens not even his own--many the lifelike line--and many the strange single word that seems to possess the power of all the parts of speech. And, having stolen them, to what use did he turn the treasures? Why, unable to give back every man his own--for they were all dead, buried, and forgotten--by a potent prayer he evoked from his Pool-Palace, overshadowed by the Dalswinton woods, the Genius of the Nith, to preserve the gathered flowers of song for ever unwithered, for that they all had grown ages ago beneath and around the green shadows of Criffel, and longed now to be embalmed in the purity of the purest river that Scotland sees flowing in unsullied silver to the sea. But the Genius of the Nith--frowning and smiling--as he looked upon his son alternately in anger, love, and pride--refused the votive offering, and told him to be gone; for that he--the Genius--was not a Cromek--and could distinguish with half an eye what belonged to antiquity, from what had undergone, in Allan's hands, change into "something rich and rare;" and above all, from what had been blown to life that very year by the breath of Allan's own genius, love-inspired by "his ain lassie," the "lass that he loe'd best," springing from seeds itself had sown, and cherished by the dews of the same gracious skies, that filled with motion and music the transparency of the river-god's never-failing urn.