Light and Shade.
Dark and dreary is the world to me,
No sun, no moon, no star;
Vainly I struggle on my midnight sea,
No beacon gleams afar;
A wilderness of winter, frost and snow,
Sad and alone I hang my head in woe.
’Tis vain to strive against the will of fate
(No sun, no moon, no star);
Where I had looked for love, I found but hate
(No beacon gleams afar);
I gave my heart, my all, to one who cares
Now nought for me—no one my sorrow shares.
Cares not my love though I were dead and gone
(No sun, no moon, no star!)
God help me, I am weak and all alone
(No beacon shines afar):
I dare not reveal my grief, I dare not tell;
The fire that burns my heart no tears can quell.
Traveller that passest o’er hill
(May thy night have its star!)
Acquaint my love that you have left me ill,
And seen my bleeding scar;
’Twere better to have killed than maimed me thus—
A bird with broken wing in the lone wilderness.
I once was happy, and how bright was then
Sun, moon, and every star!
Spotless and pure I laughed along the glen;
When, swift to mar
This happiness and peace, the spoiler came
And left me all bereft—the child of shame.
And yet I do not hate him, woe is me
(No sun, no moon, no star!)
But shun him, O ye maidens frank and free!
’Twere better far
That you were lifeless laid in the cold tomb,
In all your virgin pride and beauty’s bloom.
But God is good, and He will mercy have;
(How bright the morning star!)
Even the weary-laden find a grave—
(The beacon shines afar!)
Bless, Father of our Lord so meek and mild,
An erring mother and a helpless child.
The moral of our song is obvious, though you will observe the story is told with all possible delicacy and good taste, a characteristic, by the way, of our best Gaelic poetry. The reader may easily understand that, sung in proper time and place, and with proper feeling, such a song is calculated to have a good effect, and convey a healthy lesson in its own indirect way, when a sermon or moral exhortation, however well meant, would be altogether out of the question. There is much sound sense in Mackworth Praed’s Chaunt of the Brazen Head, the first verse of which is this—
“I think, whatever mortals crave
With impotent endeavour,
A wreath—a rank—a throne—a grave—
The world goes round for ever;
I think that life is not too long,
And, therefore, I determine,
That many people read a song,
Who will not read a sermon.”
At a bridal, baptism, or other merry-making, such a song as the above is calculated to do more good than the most laboured, well-meant, and goody-goody sermon that ever was preached. As we rode away from yonder cottage door, the woman resuming her task, and chanting a gay and lively air in accompaniment, we were reminded of a verse quite apropos to the occasion:—
“Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound:
All at her work the village maiden sings;
Nor while she turns the giddy wheel around,
Revolves the sad vicissitude of things.”
And we also thought of the simple and beautiful epitaph on the tomb of a nameless Roman matron:—
”Domum mansit, lanam fecit,”
which old Robertson of Strowan has so admirably rendered into our Scottish Doric:—
She keepit weel the house, and birlt at the wheel!
A discovery of considerable archæological interest has recently been made by some people employed in trenching the moss of Ballachulish in our neighbourhood. At a depth of ten feet in the “drift” subsoil, underlying six or seven feet of moss, only removed within recent years in the ordinary course of peat-cutting, was found the remains of what, in the far past, must have been a flint instrument manufactory on a large scale. Within an area of twenty or thirty square yards was disclosed several cartloads of flint chippings, manifestly broken off in the manufacture of flint instruments, for we have been able to secure several arrow heads, two roughly finished chisels, and a hammer head of curious shape, with a hole in the centre, which must have cost the maker no small amount of time and trouble in the manipulation. What renders this “find” more interesting is the fact that the material must have been brought to the place of manufacture from a considerable distance, flint being of rare occurrence anywhere in Nether Lochaber. Underlying such a depth of solid moss and drift, such a discovery necessarily carries us back to a race of men who lived in a very remote period indeed; how remote, even geology is as yet unable absolutely to say. We were unfortunately from home at the time the discovery was made, and were thus prevented from examining the whole in sitû. This much, however, is certain, that under a diluvial bed of drift, gravel, and sand of upwards of two feet in thickness, underlying a thickness of at least six feet of solid moss, a flint instrument manufactory is found, the work of a people who lived before the deposit of that drift and the growth of that moss. How many thousands and thousands of years ago lived that flint-working race, who, in view of the extreme slowness of geological changes, can say? We know that in the celebrated case of the discovery of flint weapons at Abbeville and elsewhere in France the remains of extinct species of elephant, rhinoceros, and other mammals were found at an immense depth in the drift alongside of flint instruments unquestionably fashioned by human hands. Whether our Ballachulish discovery is to be held as a connecting link with a people of an antiquity as remote as those of Abbeville, it would be rash positively to assert; but the flint workers, some remains of whose labours have, as we have stated, been recently brought to light in our neighbourhood, must have lived at a period when the face of the country was geologically very different from what it is now; and remembering how slowly as a rule geological changes are brought about, we shall probably be still within the mark, if approximately we fix the era of the earliest flint workers at something like ten thousand years ago, and in the case of Abbeville, Continental archæologists have had no hesitation in suggesting a still remoter antiquity.