THE CHOUGH AND CROW. The chough and crow to roost are gone, The owl sits on the tree, The hush'd wind wails with feeble moan, The wild fire dances on the fen, Both child and nurse are fast asleep, High from my lady's bower; Shrink in their murky way. Nor board nor garner own we now, Nor kind mate bound by holy vow FISHERMAN'S SONG. No fish stir in our heaving net, And the sky is dark and the night is wet; And we must ply the lusty oar, For the tide is ebbing from the shore; So kindly stored for our return. Our boat is small, and the tempest raves, Push bravely, mates! Our guiding star SONG. They who may tell love's wistful tale Love like the silent stream is found Submit, my heart; thy lot is cast, SONG. [Version taken from an old song, Woo'd and married and a’.] The bride she is winsome and bonny, Yet fast fa' the tears on her cheek. Woo'd and married and a'! To be woo'd and married at a'? Her mither then hastily spak, The gear that is gifted it never Will last like the gear that is won. Woo'd and married and a'! 4 'Toot, toot,' quo' her grey-headed faither, The chiel maun be patient and steady A kerchief sae douce and sae neat O'er her locks that the wind used to blaw! I'm baith like to laugh and to greet When I think of her married at a'!' Then out spak the wily bridegroom, Though thy ruffles or ribbons be few, Dear and dearest of ony! Ye're woo'd and buikit and a'! She turn'd, and she blush'd, and she smiled, The pride o' her heart was beguiled, And she played wi' the sleeves o' her gown. She twirled the tag o' her lace, And she nipped her boddice sae blue, Syne blinkit sae sweet in his face, [THE 'Ettrick Shepherd,' born in 1770 in Selkirkshire, where his forefathers had been sheep-farmers for generations, was discovered' by Sir Walter Scott very much in the same way in which Allan Cunningham was discovered by Cromek. Scott struck across him while engaged in his search for The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The living minstrel, in this case however, was not under the necessity of passing off his own poems as relics of an older time; Scott at once recognised his talent, and gave him a helping hand. Hogg threw aside the crook for the pen, migrated to Edinburgh, and wrote for the magazines and the booksellers. He was one of the projectors of Blackwood's Magazine in 1817, and became famous as one of the interlocutors in the Noctes Ambrosianae. The Queen's Wake, on which his poetic reputation chiefly rests, was published in 1813. He died in 1835.] Hogg owed his introduction to letters to the same sort of accident as Cunningham, and there was not a little similarity besides in their careers. Of both it may be said that there was as much of the elements of poetry in their lives as in their books. Hogg was a more boisterous character, with a much less firm grip of reality, and most at home in wild burlesque and the realms of unrestrained fancy. The combination of rough humour with sweetness and purity of sentiment is by no means rare; but Hogg is one of most eminent examples of it; all the more striking that both qualities were in him strongly accentuated by his demonstrative temperament. His humour often degenerates into deliberate loutishness, affected oddity; and his tenderness of fancy sometimes approaches 'childishness,' or, as the Scotch call it, 'bairnliness.' But with all his extravagances, there is a marked individuality in the Shepherd's songs and poems; he was a singer by genuine impulse, and there was an open-air freshness in his note. W. MINTO. |