Thy voice—Oh sweet it streams to me,
And charms my raptured breast;
Like music on the moonlight sea,
When waves are lull’d to rest.
IV.
The wealth of worlds were vain to give
Thy sinless heart to buy;
Oh I will bless thee while I live,
And love thee till I die!
From this song it appears a matter beyond doubt—for I know human nature—that the flunkie’s master had, in his earlier years, been deeply in love with some beautiful young lady, that loved him again, and that maybe, with a bounding and bursting heart, durst not let her affection be shown, from dread of her cruel relations, who insisted on her marrying some lord or baronet that she did not care one button about. If so, unhappy pair, I pity them! Were we to guess our way in the dark a wee farther, I think it not altogether unlikely, that he must have fallen in with his sweetheart abroad, when wandering about on his travels; for what follows seems to come as it were from her, lamenting his being called to leave her forlorn, and return home. This is all merely supposition on my part, and in the antiquarian style, whereby much is made out of little; but both me and James Batter are determined to be unanimously of this opinion, until otherwise convinced to the contrary. Love is a fiery and fierce passion everywhere; but I am told that we, who live in a more favoured land, know very little of the terrible effects it sometimes causes, and the bloody tragedies, which it has a thousand times produced, where the heart of man is uncontrolled by reason or religion, and his blood heated into a raging fever, by the burning sun that glows in the heaven above his head.
Here follows the poem of Taffy’s master’s foreign sweetheart; which, considering it to be a woman’s handiwork, is, I daresay, not that far amiss.
SONG OF THE SOUTH.
I.
Of all the garden flowers
The fairest is the rose;
Of winds that stir the bowers,
Oh! there is none that blows
Like the south—the gentle south—
For that balmy breeze is ours.
II.
Cold is the frozen north;
In its stern and savage mood,
’Mid gales, come drifting forth
Bleak snows and drenching flood:
But the south—the gentle south—
Thaws to love the willing blood.