Aye wakin’, oh!
Wakin’ aye and wearie;
Hope is sweet, but ne’er
Sae sweet as my dearie!”
How weak these italics! No one can doubt which of these is the better. The old song is perfect in the procession, and in the simple beauty of its thoughts and words. A ploughman or shepherd—for I hold that it is a man’s song—comes in “wat, wat” after a hard day’s work among the furrows, or on the hill. The watness of wat, wat, is as much wetter than wet as a Scotch mist is more of a mist than an English one; and he is not only wat, wat, but “weary,” longing for a dry skin and a warm bed and rest; but no sooner said and felt, than, by the law of contrast, he thinks on “Mysie” or “Ailie,” his Genevieve; and then “all thoughts, all passions, all delights,” begin to stir him, and “fain wad I rise and rin” (what a swiftness beyond run is “rin”!) Love now makes him a poet; the true imaginative power enters and takes possession of him. By this time his clothes are off, and he is snug in bed; not a wink can he sleep; that “fain” is domineering over him,—and he breaks out into what is as genuine passion and poetry, as anything from Sappho to Tennyson—abrupt, vivid, heedless of syntax. “Simmer’s a pleasant time.” Would any of our greatest geniuses, being limited to one word, have done better than take “pleasant?” and then the fine vagueness of “time!” “Flowers o’ every color;” he gets a glimpse of “herself a fairer flower,” and is off in pursuit. “The water rins ower the heugh” (a steep precipice); flinging itself wildly, passionately over, and so do I long for my true lover. Nothing can be simpler and finer than
“When I sleep, I dream;
When I wauk, I’m eerie.”
“Lanely nicht;” how much richer and touching than “darksome.” “Feather beds are saft;” “paintit 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’ comin’!—it being very likely Thursday before daybreak, 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 eyebrows, or even her eyes; he does not sit down, and in a genteel way announce that “love in thine eyes forever sits,” &c. &c., 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