And when they are buried, there springs up from their graves, as has happened in all the ballad lore and märchen of all the Aryan nations:
'Out of the one a bonnie rose bush,
And out o' the other a brier,'
that 'met and pleat' in a true lovers' knot in emblem of the immortality of love, as love was in the olden time.
These are all hackneyed phrases and incidents of the old balladists, the merest counters, borrowed, worn, and passed on through bards innumerable. But what fire and colour, what strength and pathos, continue to live in them! They smell of 'Flora and the fresh-delved earth'; they are redolent of the spring-time of human passion and thought. For the most part they belong to all ballad poetry, and not to the Scottish ballads alone. But there are other touches that seem to be peculiar to the genius of our own land and our own ballad literature; and, as has been said, one can with no great difficulty note the characteristic marks of the song of a particular district and even of an individual singer. The romantic ballads of the North, for example, although in no way behind those of the Border in strength and in tenderness, are commonly of rougher texture. They lack often the grace which, in the versions sung in the South, the minstrel knew how to combine with the manly vigour of his song; they are content with assonance where the other must have rhyme; and in many long and popular ballads, such as Tiftie's Annie and Geordie, there is scarcely so much as a good sound rhyme from beginning to end. One sometimes fancies that these Aberdonian ballads bear signs of being 'nirled' and toughened by the stress of the East Wind; they are true products of a keen, sharp climate working upon a deep and rich, but somewhat dour and stiff, historic soil.
Whether they come from the north or the south side of Tay, whether they use up the traditional plots and phrases, or strike out an original line in the story and language, our ballads have all this precious quality, that they reflect transparently the manners and morals of their time, and human nature in all times. Their vast superiority, alike in truth and in beauty, over those imitations of them that were put forward last century as improvements upon the rude old lays, may best be seen, perhaps, by laying the old and the new 'set' of Sir James the Rose side by side, or comparing verse by verse David Mallet's much vaunted William and Margaret, with the beautiful old ballad, There came a ghost to Marg'ret's door. There is indeed no comparison. The changes made are nearly all either tinsel ornaments or mutilations of the traditional text, which an eighteenth century poetaster had sought to dress up to please the modish taste of the period. Nothing can be more out of key with the simple, direct, and graphic style of the Scottish ballads, dealing with elemental emotions and the situations arising therefrom, than a style founded on that of Pope, unless it be the style of the modern poet and romancist of the analytical and introspective school.
If there ever be matter of offence in the traditional ballad, it resides in the theme and not in the handling and language. Whatever be its faults, it never has the taint of the vulgar; it avoids the suggestive with the same instinct with which it avoids the vapid adjective; it is the antithesis of the modern music-hall ditty. The balladist and his men and women speak straight to the point, and call a spade a spade.
'Ye lee, ye lee, ye leear loud,
Sae loud 's I hear ye lee,'
and
'O wae betide you, ill woman,
And an ill death may ye dee,'
are among the familiar courtesies of colloquy. In the telling of his tale, the minstrel puts off no time in preluding or introductory passages. In a single verse or couplet he has dashed into the middle of his theme, and his characters are already in dramatic parley, exchanging words like sword-thrusts. Take the opening of the immortal Dowie Dens of Yarrow, where the place, time, circumstances, and actors in the fatal quarrel are put swiftly before us in four lines: