"And it is your bridal day;
But sad would be that gay wedding
Were bridegroom and bride away.
But ride on, ride on, proud Margaret,
Till the water comes o'er your bree;
For the bride maun ride deep and deeper yet
Who rides this ford wi' me."'

But the perturbed spirit does not always thus revisit the glimpses of
the moon to awaken conscience, to humble pride, or to wreak vengeance.
More often it is the repinings and longings of passionate love that keep
it from its rest. In _maerchen_ and ballad the ghost of the lover comes
to complain that the tears which his betrothed sheds nightly fill his
shroud with blood; when she smiles, it is filled with rose leaves. The
mother steals from the grave to hap and comfort her orphan children;
their harsh stepmother neglects and ill-treats them, and their exceeding
bitter and desolate cry has penetrated beneath the sod, and reached the
dead ear. In _The Clerk's Sons o' Owsenford_, and in that singular
fragment of the same creepy theme, recovered by Scott, _The Wife of
Usher's Well_, it is the yearning of the living mother that brings the
dead sons back to their home:

'"Blaw up the fire, my maidens,
Bring water from the well!
For a' my house shall feast this nicht,
Since my three sons are well."'

The _revenants_, silent guests with staring eyes, wait and warm
themselves by the fireside, while the 'carline wife' ministers to their
wants, and spreads her 'gay mantle' over them to keep them from the
cold, until their time comes:

'"The cock doth craw, the day doth daw,
The channerin' worm doth chide;
Gin we be missed out o' our place
A sair pain we must bide."

"Lie still, be still a little wee while,
Lie still but if we may;
Gin my mother should miss us when she wakes,
She 'll gae mad, ere it be day."

O it 's they 've taen up their mother's mantle,
And they 've hung it on a pin;
"O lang may ye hing, my mother's mantle,
Ere ye hap us again."'

A chill air as from the charnel-house seems to breathe upon us while
reading the lines; the coldness, the darkness, and the horror of death
have never been painted for us with more terrible power than in the
'Wiertz Gallery' of the old balladists.

We feel this also in the ballads of the type of _Sweet William and May
Margaret_, quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher's _Knight of the Burning
Pestle_, where the dead returns t