In the fa' o' the year?

My heart is growing cauld,
And will be caulder still,
And sair sair in the fauld,
Will be the winter's chill;
For peats were yet to ca',
Our sheep they were to smear,
When my a' dwined awa',
In the fa' o' the year.

I ettle whiles to spin,
But wee wee patterin' feet,
Come rinnin' out and in,
And then I first maun greet:
I ken its fancy a'
And faster rows the tear,
That my a' dwined awa',
In the fa' o' the year.

Be kind, O heav'n abune!
To ane sae wae and lane,
An' tak' her hamewards sune,
In pity o' her mane:
Lang ere the March winds blaw,
May she, far far frae here,
Meet them a' that's awa',
Sin' the fa' o' the year.

It seems strange why the man who could write this, who shows, in the
minor key of metre, which he has so skilfully chosen, such an
instinct for the true music of words, could not have written much
more. And yet, perhaps, we have ourselves given the reason already.
There was not much more to sing about. The fashion of imitating old
Jacobite songs is past, the mine now being exhausted, to the great
comfort of sincerity and common sense. The peasantry, whose
courtship, rich in animal health, yet not over pure and refined,
Allan Ramsay sang a hundred years ago, are learning to think, and
act, and emigrate, as well as to make love. The age of Theocritus
and Bion has given place to--shall we say the age of the Caesars, or
the irruption of the barbarians?--and the love-singers of the North
are beginning to feel, that if that passion is to retain any longer
its rightful place in their popular poetry, it must be spoken of
henceforth in words as lofty and refined as those in which the most
educated and the most gifted speak of it. Hence, in the transition
between the old animalism and the new spiritualism, a jumble of the
two elements, not always felicitous; attempts at ambitious
description, after Burns's worst manner; at subjective sentiment,
after the worst manner of the world in general; and yet, all the
while, a consciousness that there was something worth keeping in the
simple objective style of the old school, without which the new
thoughtfulness would be hollow, and barren, and windy; and so the two
are patched together, "new cloth into an old garment, making the rent
worse." Accordingly, these new songs are universally troubled with
the disease of epithets. Ryan's exquisite "Lass wi' the Bonny Blue
Een," is utterly