touching key-note of a lover's grief, in an old song, which
has been most tamely rendered in Ramsay's version--these two lines
being--

"Alas! that I came o'er the moor,
And left my love behind me."

Only one verse has floated down of an old song, which breathes the very
soul of a lover's restless longings:--

"Aye wakin', O!
Wakin' aye an' eerie;
Sleep I canna get
For thinkin' on my dearie;
Aye wakin', O!"

Does it not at once pique and disappoint the fancy, that these two
graceful verses are all that remain of a song, where, doubtless, they
were once but two fair blossoms in a large and variegated posy:--

"Within my garden gay
The rose and lily grew;
But the pride of my garden is wither'd away,
And it 's a' grown o'er wi' rue.

"Farewell, ye fading flowers!
And farewell, bonnie Jean!
But the flower that is now trodden under foot,
In time it may bloom again."

Nay--passing from the tender to the grotesque--would it not have been
agreeable to hear something more than two lines from the lips of a lover
so stout-hearted, yet so ardent, in his own rough, blunt way, as he who
has thus commenced his song:--

"I wish my love were in a mire,
That I might pull her out again;"

or to know something more of the details of that extraordinary parish,
of which one surviving verse draws the following sombre picture:--

"Oh! what a parish!--eh! what a parish!
Oh! what a parish is that o' Dunkel':
They 've hang'd the minister, droon'd the precentor;
They 've pu'd doon the steeple, and drunk the kirk-bell."

The Scottish lyrics, lying all about, thus countless and scattered--

"Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks
In Vallambrosa"--

are not like those which mark and adorn the literature of many other
countries, the euphonisms of a meretricious court, or the rhymed musings
of philosophers, or conceits from Pagan mythology, or the glancing
epigrams of men of wit and of the world, or mere hunting choruses and
Bacchanalian catches of a rude squirearchy. They are the ballads, songs,
and tunes of the people. In their own language, but that language
glittering from the hidden well of poesy--in ideas which they at once
recognise as their own, because photographed from nature--these lyrics
embody the loves and thoughts of the people, the themes on which they
delight to dwell, even their passions and p