Among hills that once were a forest, and still bear that name, and by the side of a river not unknown in song, lying in his plaid on a brae among the "woolly people," behold that true son of genius—The Ettrick Shepherd. We are never so happy as when praising James; but pastoral poets are the most incomprehensible of God's creatures; and here is one of the best of them all, who confesses the "Chaldee" and denies the "Noctes!"
"The Queen's Wake" is a garland of fair forest flowers, bound with a band of rushes from the moor. It is not a poem—not it—nor was it intended to be so; you might as well call a bright bouquet of flowers a flower, which, by the by, we do in Scotland. Some of the ballads are very beautiful; one or two even splendid; most of them spirited; and the worst far better than the best that ever was written by any bard in danger of being a blockhead. "Kilmeny" alone places our (ay, our) Shepherd among the Undying Ones. London soon loses all memory of lions, let them visit her in the shape of any animal they please. But the Heart of the Forest never forgets. It knows no such word as absence. The Death of a Poet there is but the beginning of a Life of Fame. His songs no more perish than do flowers. There are no Annuals in the Forest. All are perennial; or if they do indeed die, their fadings away are invisible in the constant succession—the sweet unbroken series of everlasting bloom. So will it be in his native haunts with the many songs of the Ettrick Shepherd. The lochs may be drained—corn may grow where once the Yarrow flowed—nor is such change much more unlikely than in the olden time would have been thought the extirpation of all the vast oak-woods, where the deer trembled to fall into the den of the wolf, and the wild boar farrowed beneath the eagle's eyrie. All extinct now! But obsolete never shall be the Shepherd's plaintive or pawky, his melancholy or merry, lays. The ghost of "Mary Lee" will be seen in the moonlight coming down the hills; the "Witch of Fife" on the clouds will still bestride her besom; and the "Gude Grey Cat" will mew in imagination, were even the last mouse on his last legs, and the feline species swept off by war, pestilence, and famine, and heard to purr no more!
It is here where Burns was weakest, that the Shepherd is strongest—the world of shadows. The airy beings that to the impassioned soul of Burns seemed cold, bloodless, unattractive, rise up lovely in their own silent domains, before the dreaming fancy of the tender-hearted Shepherd. The still green beauty of the pastoral hills and vales where he passed all his days, inspired him with ever-brooding visions of Fairy Land, till, as he lay musing on the brae, the world of shadows seemed, in the clear depths, a softened reflection of real life, like the hills and heavens in the water of his native lake. When he speaks of Fairy Land, his language becomes aerial as the very voice of the fairy people, serenest images rise up with the music of the verse, and we almost believe in the being of those unlocalised realms of peace, and of which he sings like a native minstrel.
Yes, James—thou wert but a poor shepherd to the last—poor in this world's goods—though Altrive Lake is a pretty little bit farmie—given thee by the best of Dukes—with its few laigh sheep-braes—its somewhat stony hayfield or two—its pasture where Crummie might unhungered graze—nyuck for the potato's bloomy or ploomy shaws—and path-divided from the porch the garden, among whose flowers "wee Jamie" played. But nature had given thee, to console thy heart in all disappointments from the "false smiling of fortune beguiling," a boon which thou didst hug to thy heart with transport on the darkest day—the "gift o' genie," and the power of immortal song.
And has Scotland to the Ettrick Shepherd been just—been generous—as she was—or was not—to the Ayrshire peasant?—has she, in her conduct to him, shown her contrition for her sin—whatever that may have been—to Burns? It is hard to tell. Fashion tosses the feathered head—and gentility turns away her painted cheek from the Mountain Bard; but when, at the shrine of true poetry, did ever such votaries devoutly worship? Cold, false, and hollow, ever has been their admiration of genius—and different, indeed, from their evanescent ejaculations, has ever been the enduring voice of fame. Scorn be to the scorners! But Scott, and Wordsworth, and Southey, and Byron, and other great bards, have all loved the Shepherd's lays—and Joanna the palm-crowned, and Felicia the muse's darling, and Caroline the Christian poetess, and all the other fair female spirits of song. And in his native land, all hearts that love her streams, and her hills, and her cottages, and her kirks, the bee-humming garden and the primrose-circled fold, the white hawthorn and the green fairy-knowe, all delight in "Kilmeny" and "Mary Lee," and in many another vision that visited the Shepherd in the Forest.
And what can surpass many of the Shepherd's songs? The most undefinable of all undefinable kinds of poetical inspiration are surely—Songs. They seem to start up indeed from the dew-sprinkled soil of a poet's soul, like flowers; the first stanza being root, the second leaf, the third bud, and all the rest blossom, till the song is like a stalk laden with its own beauty, and laying itself down in languid delight on the soft bed of moss—song and flower alike having the same "dying fall!"
A fragment! And the more piteous because a fragment. Go in search of the pathetic, and you will find it tear-steeped, sigh-breathed, moan-muttered, and groaned in fragments. The poet seems often struck dumb by woe—his heart feels that suffering is at its acme—and that he should break off and away from a sight too sad to be longer looked on—haply too humiliating to be disclosed. So, too, it sometimes is with the beautiful. The soul in its delight seeks to escape from the emotion that oppresses it—is speechless—and the song falls mute. Such is frequently the character—and the origin of that character—of our auld Scottish Sangs. In their mournfulness are they not almost like the wail of some bird distracted on the bush from which its nest has been harried, and then suddenly flying away for ever into the woods? In their joyfulness, are they not almost like the hymn of some bird, that love-stricken suddenly darts from the tree-top down to the caresses that flutter through the spring? And such, too, are often the airs to which those dear auld sangs are sung. From excess of feeling—fragmentary; or of one divine part to which genius may be defied to conceive another, because but one hour in all time could have given it birth.
You may call this pure nonsense—but 'tis so pure that you need not fear to swallow it. All great song-writers, nevertheless, have been great thieves. Those who had the blessed fate to flourish first—to be born when "this auld cloak was new,"—the cloak we mean which nature wears—scrupled not to creep upon her as she lay asleep beneath the shadow of some single tree among
"The grace of forest woods decay'd,
And pastoral melancholy,"
and to steal the very pearls out of her hair—out of the silken snood which enamoured Pan himself had not untied in the Golden Age. Or if she ventured, as sometimes she did, to walk along the highways of the earth, they robbed her in the face of day of her dew-wrought reticule—without hurting, however, the hand from which they brushed that net of gossamer.