With a lock of his golden hair

We’ll thatch our nest when it grows bare.

Many a one for him makes moan,

But none sall ken where he is gone;

O’er his white bones when they grow bare

The wind shall blow forever mair.

Observe, the wind simply blows. That is enough; but a modern poet would have sought to intensify by making the wind moan, or shriek, or sob, or something of the kind.

Mr. Lowell here quoted a ballad which tells a story of a child-murder. It begins:

Fair Anne sate in her bower

Down by the greenwood side,