Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

one, rude enough perhaps in language and versification,-but every line, every cadence is steeped in pathos :

Ye banks, and braes, and streams around

The castle o' Montgomery,

Green be your woods, and fair your flowers,
Your waters never drumlie!!
There summer first unfauld her robes,
And there the langest tarry!
For there I took the last farewell
O' my sweet Highland Mary.

How sweetly bloomed the gay green birk,
How rich the hawthorn's blossom,
As underneath their fragrant shade
I clasp'd her to my bosom !
The golden hours on angel wings
Flew o'er me and my dearie;
For dear to me as light and life
Was my sweet Highland Mary.
Wi' mony a vow and locked embrace
Our parting was fu' tender;
And, pledging aft to meet again,
We tore oursels asunder;

But oh! fell death's untimely frost,

That nipt my flower sae early!

Now green's the sod, and cauld's the clay,
That wraps my Highland Mary!

O pale, pale now those rosy lips
I aft hae kissed sae fondly!

And closed for aye the sparkling glance
That dwelt on me sae kindly!

And mouldering now in silent dust
That heart that lo'ed 3 me dearly!
But still within my bosom's core
Shall live my Highland Mary.

These compositions are so universally known, that it is need less to give any others at full length; but we may throw together a few verses and half-verses gathered from several of them :

[blocks in formation]
[merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

I hae sworn by the heavens to my Mary,
I hae sworn by the heavens to be true;
And sae may the heavens forget me,
When I forget my vow!

O plight me your faith, my Mary,
And plight me your lily-white hand;
O plight me your faith, my Mary,
Before I leave Scotia's strand.

We hae plighted our troth, my Mary,
In mutual affection to join;

And cursed be the cause that shall part us!
The hour, and the moment o' time!

[blocks in formation]

Take away those rosy lips,
Rich with balmy treasure:
Turn away thine eyes of love,
Lest I die with pleasure.

Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear,

Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear;

Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet,
And soft as their parting tear, Jessy!

Although thou maun1 never be mine,
Although even hope is denied,

'Tis sweeter for thee despairing

Than aught in the world beside, Jessy!

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

In all, indeed, that he has written best, Burns may be said to have given us himself, the passion or sentiment which swayed or possessed him at the moment,-almost as much as in his songs. In him the poet was the same as the man. He could describe with admirable fidelity and force incidents, scenes, manners, characters, or whatever else, which had fallen within his experience or observation; but he had little proper dramatic imagination, or power of going out of himself into other natures, and, as it were, losing his personality in the creations of his fancy. His blood was too hot, his pulse beat too tumultuously, for that; at least he was during his short life too much the sport both of his own passions and of many other stormy influences to acquire such power of intellectual self-command and self-suppression. What he might have attained to if a longer earthly

[blocks in formation]

existence had been granted to him-or a less tempestuous onewho shall say? Both when his genius first blazed out upon the world, and when its light was quenched by death, it seemed as if he had been born or designed to do much more than he has done. Having written what he wrote before his twenty-seventh year, he had doubtless much more additional poetry in him than he gave forth between that date and his death at the age of thirty-seven-poetry which might now have been the world's for ever if that age had been worthy of such a gift of heaven as its glorious poet.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Ir might almost seem as if there were something in the impressiveness of the great chronological event formed by the termination of one century and the commencement of another that had been wont to act with an awakening and fructifying power upon literary genius in these islands. Of the three last great sunbursts of our literature, the first, making what has been called the Elizabethan age of our dramatic and other poetry, threw its splendour over the last quarter of the sixteenth and the first of the seventeenth century; the second, famous as the Augustan age of Anne, brightened the earlier years of the eighteenth; the nineteenth century was ushered in by the third. At the termination of the reign of George III., in the year 1820, there were still among us, not to mention minor names, at least nine or ten poetical writers, each (whatever discordance of opinion there might be about either their relative or their absolute merits) commanding universal attention from the reading world to whatever he produced:-Crabbe (to take them in the order of their seniority), Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Byron, Shelley, and perhaps we ought to add Keats, though more for the shining promise of his great but immature genius than for what he had actually done. Many other voices there were from which divine words were often heard, but these were oracles to whom all listened, whose inspiration all men acknowledged. It is such crowding and clustering of remarkable writers that has chiefly distinguished the great literary ages in every country: there are eminent writers at other times, but they come singly or in small numbers, as Lucretius, the noblest of the Latin poets, did before the Augustan age of Roman literature; as our own Milton and Dryden did in the interval between our Elizabethan age and that of Anne; as Goldsmith, and Burke, and Johnson, and then Cowper, and Burns, in twos and threes, or one by one, preceded and as it were led in the rush and crush of our last revival. For such single swallows, though they do not make, do yet commonly herald the summer; and accordingly those remarkable writers who have thus appeared between one great age of literature and another have mostly, it may be observed, arisen not in the earlier but in the later portion of the interval-have been not the

« ZurückWeiter »