"Lanely nicht;" how much richer and more touching than "darksome."
"Feather beds are saft;" "pentit rooms are bonnie;" I would infer from this, that his "dearie," his "true love," was a lass up at "the big house"—a dapper Abigail possibly—at Sir William's at the Castle, and then we have the final paroxysm upon Friday nicht—Friday at the gloamin'! O for Friday nicht!—Friday's lang o' cornin'!—it being very likely Thursday before day-break when this affectionate ululatus ended in repose.
Now, is not this rude ditty, made very likely by some clumsy, big-headed Galloway herd, full of the real stuff of love? He does not go off upon her eye-brows, or even her eyes; he does not sit down, and in a genteel way announce that "love in thine eyes for ever sits," etc. etc., or that her feet look out from under her petticoats like little mice: he is far past that; he is not making love, he is in it. This is one and a chief charm of Burns' love-songs, which are certainly of all love-songs except those wild snatches left to us by her who flung herself from the Leucadian rock, the most in earnest, the tenderest, the "most moving delicate and full of life." Burns makes you feel the reality and the depth, the truth of his passion: it is not her eyelashes, or her nose, or her dimple, or even
"A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I' the bottom of a cowslip,"
that are "winging the fervour of his love;" not even her soul; it is herself. This concentration and earnestness, this perfervor of our Scottish love poetry, seems to me to contrast curiously with the light, trifling, philandering of the English; indeed, as far as I remember, we have almost no love-songs in English, of the same class as this one, or those of Burns. They are mostly either of the genteel, or of the nautical (some of these capital), or of the comic school. Do you know the most perfect, the finest love-song in our or in any language; the love being affectionate more than passionate, love in possession not in pursuit?
"Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaidie to the angry airt,
I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee: