nd assuming thy pails, as becoming
As a lady, dear woman! grace thy motions discover.
My brown dairy, brown dairy, &c.

[128] Dress ornaments are much prized by the humbler Gael, and make a
great figure in their poetry.

[129] The most frequent of all song-images in Gaelic, is the description
of yellow or auburn hair.

THE PRAISE OF MORAG.

This is the "Faust" of Gaelic poetry, incommunicable except to the
native reader, and, like that celebrated composition, an untranslatable
tissue of tenderness, sublimity, and mocking ribaldry. The heroine is
understood to have been a young person of virtue and beauty, in the
humbler walks of life, who was quite unappropriated, except by the
imagination of the poet, and whose fame has passed into the Phillis or
Amaryllis _ideal_ of Highland accomplishment and grace. Macdonald was
married to a scold, and though his actual relations with Morag were of
the Platonic kind, he was persuaded to a retractation, entitled the
"Disparagement of Morag," which is sometimes recited as a companion
piece to the present. The consideration of brevity must plead our
apology with the Celtic readers for omitting many stanzas of the best
modern composition in their language.

URLAR.

O that I were the shaw in,[130]
When Morag was there,
Lots to be drawing
For the prize of the fair!
Mingling in your glee,
Merry maidens! We
Rolicking would be
The flow'rets along;
Time would pass away
In the oblivion of our play,
As we cropp'd the primrose gay,
The rock-clefts among;
Then in mock we 'd fight,
Then we 'd take to flight,
Then we 'd lose us quite,
Where the cliffs overhung.

Like the dew-drop blue
In the mist of morn
So thine eye, and thy hue
Put the blossom to scorn.
All beauties they shower
On thy person their dower;
Above is the flower,
Beneath is the stem;
'Tis a sun 'mid the gleamers,
'Tis a star 'mid the streamers,
'Mid the flower-buds it shimmers
The foremost of them!
Darkens eye-sight at thy ray!
As we wonder, still we say
Can it be a thing of clay
We see in that gem?

Since thy first feature
Sparkled before me,
Fair! not a creature
Was like thy glory.[131]....

[130] We must suppose some sylvan social occupation, as oak-peeling or
the like, in which Morag and her asso