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The effect of reading this old ballad is as if all our hopes and fears hung upon the last fibre of the heart, and we felt that giving way. What silence, what loneliness, what leisure for grief and despair!

"My father pressed me sair,

Though my mother did na' speak;

But she looked in my face

Till my heart was like to break."

The irksomeness of the situations, the sense of painful dependence, is excessive; and yet the sentiment of deep-rooted, patient affection triumphs over all, and is the only impression that remains. Lady Ann Bothwell's Lament is not, I think, quite equal to the lines beginning

"O waly, waly, up the bank,

And waly, waly, down the brae,
And waly, waly, yon burn side,
Where I and my love wont to gae.

I leant my back unto an aik,

I thought it was a trusty tree;
But first it bow'd, and syne it brak,
Sae my true-love's forsaken me.

O waly, waly, love is bonny,

A little time while it is new;

But when its auld, it waxeth cauld,

And fades awa' like the morning dew, Whan cockle-shells turn siller bells,

And muscles grow on every tree, Whan frost and snaw sall warm us aw, Then sall my love prove true to me.

Now Arthur seat sall be my bed,

The sheets sall ne'er be fyld by me: Saint Anton's well sall be my drink, Since my true love's forsaken me. Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blaw, And shake the green leaves aff the tree? O gentle death, whan wilt thou cum, And tak' a life that wearies me!

'Tis not the frost that freezes sae, Nor blawing snaw's inclemencie,

'Tis not sic cauld, that makes me cry,

But my love's heart grown cauld to me. Whan we came in by Glasgow town,

We were a comely sight to see, My love was clad in black velvet, And I myself in cramasie.

But had I wist before I kist,

That love had been sae hard to win;
I'd lockt my heart in case of gowd,
And pinn'd it with a siller pin.
And oh! if my poor babe were born,

And set upon the nurse's knee,

And I mysel in the cold grave!

Since my true-love's forsaken me."

The finest modern imitation of this style is the Braes of Yarrow; and perhaps the finest subject for a story of the same kind in any modern book, is that told in Turner's History of England, of a Mahometan woman, who having fallen in love with an English merchant, the father of Thomas à Becket, followed him all the way to England, knowing only the word London, and the name of her lover, Gilbert.

But to have done with this, which is rather too serious a subject. The old English ballads are of a gayer and more lively turn. They are adventurous and romantic; but they relate chiefly to good living and good fellowship, to drinking and hunting scenes. Robin Hood is the chief of these, and he still, in imagination, haunts Sherwood Forest. The archers green glimmer under the waving branches, the print on the grass remains where they have just finished their noon-tide meal under the green-wood tree, and the echo of their bugle-horn and twanging bows resounds through the tangled mazes of the forest, as the tall slim deer glances startled by.

"The trees in Sherwood Forest are old and good;
The grass beneath them now is dimly green:
Are they deserted all? Is no young mien,

With loose-slung bugle, met within the wood?

No arrow found-foil'd of its antler'd food

Struck in the oak's rude side? Is there nought seen To mark the revelries which there have been, In the sweet days of merry Robin Hood?

Go there with summer, and with evening-go
In the soft shadows, like some wand'ring man
And thou shalt far amid the forest know
The archer-men in green, with belt and bow,
Feasting on pheasant, river-fowl, and swan,
With Robin at their head, and Marian.”*

* Sonnet on Sherwood Forest, by J. H. Reynolds, Esq.

LECTURE VIII.

upon

ON THE LIVING POETS.

"No more of talk where God or Angel guest
With man, as with his friend, familiar us'd
To sit indulgent.".

GENIUS is the heir of fame; but the hard condition on which the bright reversion must be earned is the loss of life. Fame is the recompense not of the living, but of the dead. The temple of fame stands upon the grave: the flame that burns its altars is kindled from the ashes of great men. Fame itself is immortal, but it is not begot till the breath of genius is extinguished. For fame is not popularity, the shout of the multitude, the idle buzz of fashion, the venal puff, the soothing flattery of favour or of friendship; but it is the spirit of a man surviving himself in the minds and thoughts of other men, undying and imperishable. It is the power which the intellect exer

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