WILLIAM ROSS.
This sensitive and delightful poet was born at Broadford, Isle of Skye, in 1762. He received good education at the parish school of Forres, where he highly distinguished himself. He made a particular study of his native language, and was also well acquainted with Latin and Greek. He sang sweetly, and played on the violin, flute, and other instruments with considerable skill. He became parish schoolmaster of Gairloch, Ross-shire, where he was a very successful teacher. He did not fill this situation, however, very long. He died of consumption in 1790, in the twenty-eighth year of his age. His early death is said to have been hastened by a love disappointment. In Cuachag nan Eraobh, one of his best-known songs, he indulges in melancholy and painful reflections. It is addressed to a cuckoo that settled on the branch of a tree beside him. He remembers his false love and sings:—
Nought to me but a sting all her bright beauties bring—
I droop with decay, and I languish;
There’s a pain at my heart like a pitiless dart,
And I waste all away with anguish.
She has stolen the hue on my young cheeks that grew,
And much she has caused my sorrow;
Unless now she renew with her kindness that hue
Death will soon bid me “Good morrow.”
Death did soon bid poor Ross “good morrow” and in this song, like Michael Bruce, he sang his own elegy. How pathetically the poet cries in the prospect of death!—
If she were thus low, with what haste should I go
To ask how the maiden was faring:
Now short the delay till a mournful array
The brink of my grave will be bearing!
Ross is a poet of a high order, and one of the sweetest minstrels the Highlands have produced. Many of his songs are highly popular. The exquisite sweetness and finish of Ross appear in his praise of the “Highland Maid,” the first two stanzas of which are rendered as follows by Mr Angus Macphail, whose early death has been a loss to Gaelic literature:—
My pretty Highland maiden,
With tresses golden bright,
And blue eyes softly shading,
And soft hands snowy white;
O’er Scotland’s hills and plains
With thee I fain would go,
Wrapped in our native tartan plaids
That in the breezes flow.
Give me my Highland dress,
’Tis grand beyond compare;
Give me my Highland maid,
Sweet, smiling, young, and fair;
Then banish sleep and care,
From eve to rosy morn,
In happy love beneath our plaid,
The proudest dress that’s worn.
Ross is one of the best known and best loved of all the Gaelic bards. His career, so similar to that of Keats, ends so prematurely and pathetically that his memory has become engraven on the hearts of all who hear his story and love to sing his songs.