Perthshire in bygone days

EOBERT TANNAHILL. 519
alternative rose up, — reason lost her counteracting power,
and the estimable life, that a few kindly words might have
saved, was immolated at the shrine of mistaken ambition.
How sincerely we regret that no one met the resolute man
on his way to death ; for it would have awakened in him
the grandest test of the human heart — that feature of its
nobility which has undergone no debasement — its active
sympathy with distress. It may safely be asserted that
there was not a man or woman amongst that community
of sixty thousand that would not have rushed to their poet's
protection, and, at great personal hazard, have saved him
from his own uplifted hand ; but, with that cunning so
characteristic of temporary insanity, Eobert waited the fall
of evening, and while his poor sick mother, for whom he
had promised so much, was asleep in another apartment,
he stole from his bed, and, cowering like a guilty thing,
crept away under the shadows of the glimmering oil-lamps,
to the deepest pool in the little river, and, deliberately
taking off his coat, made that agonising plunge which
separated him for ever from his admiring countrymen,
and soiled a page of human life that might otherwise have
been opened with pleasure and profit.
In no part of this sad transaction did Tannahill act with
desperation or frenzy ; he had familiarised his mind to
what he conceived to be his inevitable doom, and went
through it with dramatic precision. He appealed from the
judgment of man to the judgment of God. He shrank
from the world's cold shoulder because he felt it, and
sought the colder grave, where he would not feel. The
little river received him kindly, and covered all his
troubles ; it washed over him in gentle surges on its way
to the ocean, unconscious of the meek but guilty spirit that
had bubbled up from his bosom. The dark night hid for a
time from his friends the confirmation of their worst fears ;
but when the grey May morning dawned, the discarded
coat was found, and before the click of the loom announced
the awakened community, the lifeless body of him whose
flute-notes had so long heralded the morn, lay cold on the
humble bed, and his spirit had escaped from the thraldom
of disappointed hopes and the indifference of a self-
interested world.