Here is another metre from a beautiful Scotch Gaelic poem. The Scotch Gaels, like the Irish, produced about the same time a wonderful outburst of lyric poetry worthy to take a place in the national literature beside the spirited ballads of the Lowlands. Unlike the Lowlands, however, neither they nor the Irish can be said to have at all succeeded with the ballad.
"To a fAR mountain hARbour
Prince ChARlie came flYing,
The wInds from the HIghlands
Wailed wIld in the air,
On his breast was no stAR,
And no guARd was besIde him,
But a girl by him glIding
Who guIded him there.
Like a rAy went the mAiden
Still fAithful, but mOurning,
For ChARlie was pARting
From heARts that adOred him,
And sIghing besIde him
She spIed over Ocean
The Oarsmen befOre them
ApprOaching their lair."[15]
These beautiful and recondite measures were meant apparently to imitate music, and many of them are wedded to well-known airs. They did not all come into vogue at the same time, but reached their highest pitch of perfection and melody—melody at times exaggerated, too luscious, almost cloying—about the middle of the eighteenth century, at a time when the Irish, deprived by the Penal laws of all possibility of bettering their condition or of educating themselves, could do nothing but sing, which they did in every county of Ireland, with all the sweetness of the dying swan.
Dr. Geoffrey Keating, the historian, himself said to have been a casual habitué of the schools of the bards, and a close friend of many of the bardic professors, was nevertheless one of the first to wring himself free from the fetters of the classical metres, and to adopt an accented instead of a syllabic standard of verse. We must now go back and give some account of this remarkable man, and of some of his contemporaries of the seventeenth century.
[1] Their classification was as follows:—
S stood by itself because of the peculiar phonetic laws which it obeys.
P.C.T. called soft consonants [really hard not soft].
B.G.D. called hard consonants [these are in fact rather soft than hard],
F. CH. TH. called rough consonants.
LL. M. NN. NG. RR. called strong consonants.
Bh. Dh. Ch. Mh. L.N.R. called light consonants.
[2] "Diese Klasseneinteilung bekundet einen feinen Sinn für das Wesen der Laute," says Herr Stern, in the article I have just quoted from. See also the prosody in O'Donovan's grammar.
[3] "Eagle." This English rann dramatically denotes the longevity of that bird, as does also a well-known Irish one.
[4] See for her poems "Sár-obair na mbárd Gaelach," by Mackenzie, p. 22. Unfortunately he gives us no full account of where the poems were collected, all he says is, "We have the authority of several persons of high respectability, and on whose testimony we can rely, that Mary McLeod was the veritable authoress of the poems attributed to her in this work." This is, in an important matter of the kind, very unsatisfactory, but Mary's poem, "An talla 'm bu ghná le MacLeód," seems to bear internal evidence of its own antiquity in its allusions to the chief's bow—
"Si do lámh nach robh tuisleach,
Dol a chaitheadh a chuspair
Led' bhogha cruaidh ruiteach deagh-neóil,"