spectres and questions which centuries of life and speculation have since started. They had simpler hearts and lived in simpler times. They sang to rude and uncultured men; their task was to touch their spirits and evoke their sympathies, and, from their peculiar environments and training, they exhibit an artlessness and simplicity which becomes at times the very perfection of style, and which-whatever other merits modern singers may possess cannot be expected to appear in any thing like the same degree in an artificial and fastidious age. In pathos they are supreme. Nothing can be placed beside them. It is so direct and simple, and goes so to the heart. There is an element of helplessness in it which is overpowering. It is piteous as the complaint of a little child.

seeking a "new outlet for one's self," which | writers living under different circumstances is the cause of nearly all the vices of con- were of course untouched by these peculiar temporary literature-of poetry especially. temptations, nor had they to face the On it may be charged the strain and glitter, the forced and perverse originality, and the extraordinary innovations in rhythm and measure of which so much is heard, both in the way of applause and condemnation. The primal emotions of humanity have been so fully sung in England, during the last two hundred years, that a poet of the present period, unless he is swept away by the torrent of feeling, or is bold enough-which he is perfectly justified in being-to look upon every situation of life, whether expressed before or not, as merely poetic material, and to use it for his own purposes, color it by his own mind, shape it by his own emotion, -is tempted, when he remembers in a former writer some consummate expression of an idea, indispensable to the sequence and stream of emotion, to diverge from the direct path, and to attest his originality by becom- Sir Philip Sidney said long ago that the ing unintelligible or unnatural. It is re- ballad of Chevy-Chase, although" sung but quired of every builder that he should erect by some blinde crowder," stirred his blood a house new and well-proportioned; it is" more than a trumpet. The publication not required that he should, with his own of Bishop Percy's "Reliques," at the close hands, have baked every brick employed in of the last century, was the salvation of the edifice. The existing system of criti- English poetry. The world was weary of cism, and the greatness and fulness of litera- the museums of Darwin and Hayley, with ture, are in many respects i jurious to poeti- their wax figures arrayed in dresses stiff with cal writers. An author's first book is embroidery and gold;-pretty enough to generally written con amore and for himself; look on as curiosities in their gorgeous apcritic and reader are forgotten in the heat parel, but with never a flash in their glassy and delight of the task; but after he has eyes, never a throb beneath their costly run the gauntlet of dailies, weeklies, month-clothes. In the " Reliques" had returned lies, and quarterlies, he becomes more conscious and less single-hearted. He writes with one eye to his subject, and the other to what the reviewers will say of him. He is more careful of the expression than of the thought. He desires to dazzle and astonish. He is no longer an inspired singer uttering words of fire; he is a lapidary coldly polishing a gem. The condition of the modern author resembles that of the flying-fish; if it seeks the air to escape its water foes, pounce come the gulls upon it. If he writes quietly, he is common-place; if strikingly, he is a sky-rocket, with a noisy rush to heaven, a brilliant burst and shower of falling splendors, and then utter darkness and oblivion. He must either be crazy or dull. Under which king, Bezonian, speak or die! or Most men prefer the former. The ballad-"He hadna sailed a league, a league, A league, but barely three;

tenderness, and nature, and passion. The voices of men and women were again heard in gladness and grief, the globed dews were lying thick on the purple moors, the wind was blowing strong and fresh, curling the faces of the streams, and bringing odors from the forests. The rivers of poetry had been frozen up, but the spring had come and loosened their icy chains, and they flowed forth again exulting and abounding.

Coleridge has praised the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens." Being familiar to most readers, it need not now be quoted at length. Passing, however, such graphic touches of description as—

"I saw the new moon late yestreen,
Wi? the auld moon in her arm;

When the lift grew dark, and the wind blew the lament with which they open; the grim loud, satisfaction with which he recounts his progress down the river, his foe being his

And gurly grew attention may be drawn to its magnificent guide," repeated as if that gave an addiclose

"O, then bespaik her dochter dear,
She was baith jimp and sma',
'O, row me in a pair o' sheets

And tow me ower the wa'.'
"They rowed her in a pair o' sheets,
They tow'd her ower the wa';
But on the point o' Gordon's spear
She got a deadly fa'.
"O bonnie bonnie was her mouth,
And cherry were her cheeks;
And clear clear was her yellow hair,
From which the red bluid dreeps.
"Then wi' his spear he turned her ower,
O gin her face was wan!
He said, 'Ye are the first that eir
I wished alive again.'

"He turned her ower and ower again,

O gin her skin was white!
'I might hae spared that bonnie face
To hae been some man's delight.
"Busk and boun my merry men a',
For ill dooms I do guess;

I canna luik on that bonnie face
As it lies on the grass.'

"He slew my knight to me sae dear,

He slew my knight and poin'd his gear:
My servants all for life did flee,
And left me in extremitie.

"I sewed his sheet, making my mane:
I watched the corpse myself alane;
I watched his body night and day,
No living creature came that way.
"I took his body on my back,

And whiles I gaed and whiles I sat;
I digg'd a grave and laid him in,
And happed him with the sod so green.

*

"But think na ye my heart was sair,
When I laid the moul' on his yellow hair;
O think na ye my heart was wae,
When I turned about away to gae."

Does the reader remember any thing half
so touching as that woman's lonely vigil by
the dead, in a solitude where no creature
came, or her progress to some secret place,
carrying the body of her lord, sitting down
weary with the burden, and then up and
struggling on again? There is in the verses
no tumult, no complaint, no wild wringing
of sorrowful hands, no frenzied appeal to the
pitiless heaven that saw the deed and made
no sign. A broken heart indulges in neither
trope nor metaphor; the language is simple
as a child's, the circumstances are related
without
any passion or excitement. All
lesser feelings are lost and swallowed up in
utter desolation and woe.

The writer of "Edom o' Gordon" had no theories of art. He uttered only what he saw and felt; but what words could add to that picture of the burning tower, the unutterable sigh of the mother for ane blast o' the western wind," and the mute reproach of the face on the grass, more terrible to the marauder than the gleam of hostile spears. There is an expression of misery in these Ballads which appears frequently in Scottish There is an old song, published by Dr. song, and is in some degree peculiar to the Percy in his Reliques, which illustrates the compositions of the nation. It is a ghost hopeless pathos to which allusion has been which rises out of the ashes of passion; the made. The circumstances of the tragedy despair of that love,-caused by stroke of are unknown. All that has come down to death or heartlessness of man,-which knew us is the following strain of mournful neither pride of birth, nor riches, nor shame, nor death, which was conscious only of itself, blind to every thing save its own rapture and its own joy; a mental state, not grief, not pain, but rather a dull stupor of misery, which would welcome sharp pain itself as a relief from its own bewilderment, which turns passionately to death, and hugs oblivion like a lover. The heart has crowded all on one throw of the dice: that lost, the forgetfulness of the grave, and a quiet coverlet of waving grass, is all that even Hope desires.

In 1529, James V. made an expedition to the borders, and executed many of the freebooters. One of those who suffered was Cockburn, of Henderland. He was hanged by command of the king over the gateway of bis own tower. The following verses seem to have been composed by his wife :

music:

"O waly waly up the bank,

And waly waly down the brae,
And waly waly yon burn-side,

Where I and my love wer wont to gae.

I leant my back unto an aik,

I thought it was a trusty tree,
But first it bowed and syne it brak,

Sae my true love did lechtly me.
derness and pathos of the word happed? It is one
*Can the English reader catch the strange ten-
of the dearest to a Scottish ear, recalling infancy
and the thousand instances of the love of a moth-
er's heart, and the unwearied care of a mother's
hand. The red-breast happed the dead bodies of
the Babes in the Wood with leaves. Happed is
the nursery word in Scotland, expressing the care
with which the bed-clothes are laid upon the little
forms, and carefully tucked in about the round
sleeping cheeks. What an expression it gives in
of fondness, all wasted and lavished on unheeding
the verses quoted above to the burden and agony
clay!

"O waly waly gin love be bonny
A little time while it is new;
But when it's auld it waxeth cauld,
And fades away like morning dew.
O wherefore should I busk my head?
Or wherefore should I kame my hair?
For my true love has me forsook,

And says he'll never lo'e me mair. "Now Arthur-Seat shall be my bed,

The sheets shall ne'er be fyled by me;
Saint Anton's well sall be my drink,

Since my true love has forsaken me.
Marti'mas wind, when wilt thou blaw,
And shake the green leaves aff the tree'?
O gentle death! when wilt thou cum,
For of my life I am wearie.

""Tis not the frost that freezes fell,

Nor blawing snaw's inclemencie :
'Tis not sic cauld that makes me cry,
But my love's heart grown cauld to me.
Whan we came in by Glasgowe town,

We were a comely sight to see,
My love was cled in black velvet,
And I mysell in cramasie.

"But had I wist before I kist,

That love had been sae ill to win,
I had lockt my heart in a case o' gowd
And pinned it with a siller pin.
And O if my young babe were born,
And set upon the nurse's knee,
And I mysell were dead and gane,

For a maid again Ise never be."

Burns in one of his letters quotes the following stanzas from an old ballad he had picked up among the country people. It breathes the same hopeless misery as those already quoted, and pines like them for the rest of the grave:

"O that my father had ne'er on me smiled!

O that my mother had ne'er to me sung! O that my cradle had never been rocked! But that I had died when I was young.

"O that the grave it were my bed!

trict in which they were supposed to reside,
he piously crossed himself, and murmured a
prayer to Mary Mother. Perhaps, owing
to the desolate aspect of the scenery, and the
sterner character of the people, the supersti-
tions of Scotland are of a more terrific na-
ture than those of the sister kingdom. The
Scotch have no Puck or Robin Goodfellow.
The taciturn Brownie who sets the house to
rights, who threshes as much corn in a sin-
gle night as six husbandmen could accomplish
in a summer's day, and forsakes the family
when he is insulted by any offer of gift or
reward, is the most kindly disposed to hu-
man beings. The greater proportion, how-
ever, of the creatures of popular supersti-
tion are of an uncanny and vindictive
disposition. There is the restless Will o'
the Wisp, who betrays the traveller into the
treacherous bog and deep morass; the Water
Kelpie, who haunts at midnight the fords
of swollen streams, and raises shrieks of
eldritch laughter, when horse and man are
swept away by the current. And there are
the Fairies, whose mossy rings are still to be
seen on the hill-side, and when the peasant
is overtaken on the lonely moor by these
phantom riders in chase of a phantom stag,
although he sees nothing, a sound of horns
and dogs sweeps past him on the wind; and
on Hallow-mass eve, when they ride forth in
courtly and measured procession, dim shapes

are visible in the moonbeams, and he hears the trampling of innumerable tiny hoofs, and. the music of their bridle-bells. The Fairies are a kidnapping people, and have acquired great dexterity in their art. They carry off young children, and leave a peevish and My blankets were my winding-sheet! misshapen elf in its place; and persons of The clocks and the worms my bed-fellows a', maturer age, if they happen to sleep within And, O, sae sound as I should sleep." the rings after sunset, are pretty certain to "What a sigh was there!" Burns adds; awake in Fairyland. Many a child who "I do not remember, in all my reading, to wandered out to gather berries in the wood, have met with any thing more truly the lan- and who was sought in the evening with guage of misery than the exclamation in the tears and a broken heart, and so the next last line. Misery is like love; to speak its day and the next, is now a happy page to language truly the author must have felt it." the Fairy queen. Many a man who never The ballads relating to sprites, fairies, and returned from his distant journey, and for other supernatural creatures, are not many whose soul mass has been sung and prayers in number, but are mostly of great poetic offered, and whose wife, who thought she beauty. From these compositions we gain never could have forgotten him, sleeps in the considerable information regarding the spir- bosom of another husband, is at this moitual agents in which the mounted robber of ment stretched in one of the sweet-smelling the marches believed, and at the mention of valleys, and basking in the everlasting sunwhose name, or at his approach to the dis-shine of that Land of Dream, wondering,

こ

"Then I would never tire, Janet,

In Elfish land to dwell,
But aye, at every seven years,
The pay the teind to hell;
And I am sae fat and fair of flesh,
I fear 'twill be mysell."

must act to-night or never.

He adds that that evening in Halloween,
the evening when the Fairies would ride
abroad, and that if she would save him, she
She asks how
she should recognize him among the passing
cavaliers. He replies:-
troops of ghostly knights and unearthly

"The first company that passes by,

Say na, and let them gae;
The next company that passes by,
Sae na, and do right sae;
The third company that passes by,
Then I'll be ane o' thae.

"First let pass the black, Janet,

And syne let pass the brown;
But grip ye to the milk-white steed,
And pu' the rider down.

"For I ride on the milk-white steed,
And aye nearest the toun;
Because I was a christened knight,
They gave me that renown.
"My right hand will be gloved, Janet,
My left hand will be bare;
And these the tokens I gie thee,
Nae doubt I will be there.
"They'll turn me in your arms, Janet,
An adder and a snake;

perhaps, what his old companions are about| on the earth, and if they ever think of him now. Seek not to return, O lost one! However unpleasant to believe, the world wags just as comfortably as when you were one of its denizens. The chair you sat upon is filled. The heart that loved you once has changed its allegiance, and loves another quite as fondly and devotedly. The guests have sat down, every seat is occupied ; there is no room for you at the feast. When one of these lost ones wishes to return to earth he informs some friend by dream that he has been carried away by the " good people," and points out the method in which his release can be accomplished. The friend thus commissioned takes his station on Hallow-mass eve on the highway along which the Fairies are to pass. Soon the cavalcade is heard approaching. He stands forward and seizes a rider by the mantle, and claims him by name. After some altercation and fierce struggles, the procession sweeps on with murmurs of discontent; a hurried trample of innumerable hoofs and clash of angry bells, and two human beings are standing on the midnight road. In the ballad of "6 Young Tamlane," we are told how a lady rescued her lover in this manner from the Fairies, and we are also admitted behind the scenes and learn why the "good people' have a penchant for the children of human parents. Elf-land, it seems, like every other land, has its secret history and its own annoyances. It appears, then, that the land of Fairy must pay tribute to Hell once every seven years, that tribute being its fattest inhabitant. The Fairies naturally prefer handing over to the tender mercies of the Fiend one of the human mortals whom they have ensnared rather than one of their own race. Young Tamlane is unhappily inclined to obesity; in fact he is the Jack Falstaff of Fairy Land; and as the seven years are nearly expired, and the time draws near when Hell must receive its due, his sleek and well-to-do condition throws him into a state of considerable trepidation. He therefore appears to his lady-love and tells her that he enjoys exceedingly the pleasure Janet takes her station at the Miles Cross, of Elf-land; indeed, he would not think of pulled down the rider on the milk-white changing his residence but for the weighty steed, and held her lover fast through all his considerations already mentioned, which he changing shapes. After her green mantle describes with considerable naïveté and was thrown over him, the wrathful voice of pathos: the Fairy Queen was heard

66

But haud me fast, let me not pass,
Gin ye wad buy me maik.

They'll turn me in your arms, Janet,
An adder and an ask;

They'll turn me in your arms, Janet,
A bale that burns fast.

"They'll turn me in your arms, Janet,
A red-hot gad o' airn;
But haud me fast, let me not pass,
For I'll do you no harm.
"They'll shape me in your arms, Janet,
A tod, but, and an eel;

But haud me fast, nor let me gang,
As you do love me weel.

"They'll shape me in your arms, Janet,
A dove, but, and a swan,

And last they'll shape me in your arms
A mother-naked man :

Cast your green mantle over me,

I'll be myself again."