Fause luve, ye’ve shapit a weed for me
In simmer amang the flowers;
I will repay thee back again
In winter amang the showers.
The snow so white shall be your weed,
In hate you shall be drest,
The cauld east wind shall wrap your heid
And the sharp rain on your breist.
But I question if folk-poetry ever captured a lilt more exquisite than that of the first four lines of “The Gardener” or a sharper note of anguish than that of the last quatrain.[3] To me at least Old Scots must always remain the language of the ballad par excellence, by virtue of the subtlety, the finely wrought and divinely coloured wealth of expressive idiom which bursts from its treasure-chest in a profusion of begemmed and enamelled richness, more various, more magical than any Spanish gold. Much of this Lockhart filched to give his Castilian bullion a replating. But in places he falls back most wretchedly upon the poetical trickeries of his day, falls to the level of Rogers and Southey, to the miserable devices and tinsel beggary of those bravely bound annuals beloved by the dames and damsels of the day before yesterday. In places, however, he outballads the ballad in pure gaucherie.
These words she spake, then down she knelt, and took the bowman’s blow,