ur happiest
hours there may have been something in common with our most
sorrowful--some shade of sadness cast over them by a passing cloud, that
now allies them in retrospect with the sombre spirit of grief; and in
our unhappiest hours there may have been gleams of gladness, that seem
now to give the return the calm character of peace. Do not all thoughts
and feelings, almost all events, seem to resemble each other--when they
are dreamt of as all past? All receive a sort of sanctification in the
stillness of the time that has gone by--just like the human being whom
they adorned or degraded--when they, too, are at last buried together in
the bosom of the same earth.

Perhaps none among us ever wrote verses of any worth, who had not been,
more or less, readers of our old ballads. All our poets have been
so--and even Wordsworth would not have been the veritable and only
Wordsworth, had he not in boyhood pored--oh, the miser!--over Percy's
"Reliques." From the highest to the humblest, they have all drunk from
those silver springs. Shepherds and herdsmen and woodsmen have been the
masters of the mighty--their strains have, like the voice of a solitary
lute, inspired a power of sadness into the hearts of great poets that
gave their genius to be prevalent over all tears, or with a power of
sublimity that gave it dominion over all terror, like the sound of a
trumpet. "The Babes in the Wood!" "Chevy Chace!" Men become women while
they weep--

"Or start up heroes from the glorious strain."

Sing then "The Dirge," my Margaret, to the Old Man, "so tender and so
true" to the spirit of those old ballads, which we might think were
written by Pity's self.

DIRGE.

"O dig a grave, and dig it deep,
Where I and my true love may sleep!
We'll dig a grave, and dig it deep,
Where thou and thy true love shall sleep!

And let it be five fathom low,
Where winter winds may never blow!--
And it shall be five fathom low,
Where winter winds shall never blow!

And let it be on yonder hill,
Where grows the mountain daffodil!--
And it shall be on yonder hill,
Where grows the mountain daffodil!

And plant it round with holy briers,
To fright away the fairy fires!--
We'll plant it round with holy briers!
To fright away the fairy fires!

And set it round with celandine,
And nodding heads of columbine!--
We'll set it round with celandine,