O Victor Emmanuel the King. The sword be for thee, and the deed, And nought for the alien, next spring, rought for Hapsburg and Bourbon agreedy But for us, a great Italy freed, with a hero to head us... our CHILD King Elizabeth Barrett Browning, POEMS OF ADVENTURE AND RURAL SPORTS. CHEVY-CHASE. [Percy, Earl of Northumberland, had vowed to hunt for three days in the Scottish border, without condescending to ask leave from Earl Douglas, who was either lord of the soil or lord warden of the Marches. This provoked the conflict which was celebrated in the old ballad of the "Hunting a' the Cheviot." The circumstances of the battle of Otterbourne (A. D. 1388) are woven into the ballad and the affairs of the two events confounded. The ballad preserved in the Percy Reliques is probably as old as 1574- The one following is a modernized form of the time of James I.] GOD prosper long our noble king, Our lives and safeties all; A woful hunting once there did To drive the deer with hound and horn The child may rue that is unborn The stout Earl of Northumberland His pleasure in the Scottish woods And long before high noon they had The bowmen mustered on the hills, And all their rear, with special care, The hounds ran swiftly through the woods That with their cries the hills and dales Lord Percy to the quarry went, To view the slaughtered deer; "But if I thought he would not come, "Lo, yonder doth Earl Douglas come, "All men of pleasant Teviotdale, "Then cease your sports," Earl Percy said, "And take your bows with speed; "And now with me, my countrymen, "That ever did on horseback come, I durst encounter man for man, Earl Douglas on his milk-white steed, Rode foremost of his company, "Show me," said he, "whose men you be, That hunt so boldly here, That, without my consent, do chase And kill my fallow-deer." |