s'
tragedies? Certainly no stream has been more besung. The name is
redolent of all that is most pathetic in Border poetry. This is the
centre of the Border ballad country--the birthplace, or, at all events,
the nursing-ground of a romance than which there is none richer or more
extensive on either side of the Border. The Yarrow is the Scottish
Rhine-land on a small scale, even more so than the Tweed. Tweedside,
indeed, has not a tithe of Yarrow's ballad wealth, and the Tweed ballads
and folk-lore are absolutely different in respect both of subject-matter
and of manner. The curious feature about Yarrow is the wonderful
sameness which characterises the whole of its minstrelsy. For hundreds
of years that has been so. Sadness is the uppermost note that is
sounded. All through we are face to face with a feeling of dejection as
remarkable as it is common. One could have understood a stray effusion
or so couched in this strain, but for an entire minstrelsy to breathe
such a spirit is extraordinary. Why should Yarrow be the
personification, as it were, of a grief and a melancholy that nothing
seems able to assuage? Is there anything in the scenery to account for
it--anything in the physical conditions of the glen itself that solves
the secret? There is, and there isn't. To a mere outsider--a mere summer
tripper hurrying through--Yarrow is little different from others of the
southland valleys. Its main features are identical with those of the
Ettrick, and the Tweed uplands, or with the Ewes and the Teviot. All of
them exhibit the same pastoral stillness. The same play of light and
shade are on their hills. The same soothing spirit broods over them. But
of Yarrow alone it is the element of sadness that prevails. To
understand this, one has to _live_ in Yarrow--to come under the
influence of its environment. And whether it be fancy or not, whether it
be the result of one's reading, and of one's pre-conceived notions of
the place, the Yarrow landscape does lend itself to the realisation of
that feeling which the ballads so well portray. The configuration of the
glen as seen especially from a little above Yarrow Manse--the "Dowie
Dens" of popular tradition--together with its climatic conditions, may
very easily interpret for us the spirit of those old singers. Here, if
anywhere in the valley, the answer to the Yarrow enigma will be found.
Professor Veitch thinks that the whole district affords such an answer:
"Nor will anyone," he s