I must ever keep unknown;
But unless relief comes quickly
All my freshness will be gone.
Ah! the name of my beloved
Ne’er to other can be told;
He put me in lasting fetters;—
Pity me a hundredfold.
In surveying the arena of history we observe places geographically small sending forth the most prevailing of the forces that have fashioned the course of civilisation. A glance at one or two countries will readily illustrate the significance of the great factors at work in the making of the world’s annals. We discern in Judea, a small strip of land, the country whence the all-conquering religion and civilisation of the whole earth have come; we find in Greece—a small concatenation of tribes and provinces—a philosophic and æsthetic power which has supplied the minds of men with profound wisdom for centuries; for our laws and many of our customs and institutions we are indebted to Rome, Pagan and Christian—a city in a comparatively petty peninsula; in our own isles of the Gentiles, not excluding Man, Ireland, and St. Kilda, there has been developed the greatest moral force of the present, and it may be said of any millennium hitherto. Our British islands look small indeed on the chart of the world; and it is possible that our geographical insignificance may tempt everweening, inimical powers, and some of our own subject nationalities, to touch unkindly some day the mane of the British lion; but very vainly indeed as long as Christian manliness resides in the hearts of never-enslaved Britons.
Along the coasts of Britain lie several islets where were nursed and whence have emanated national elements of moral power which have to some extent influenced our all-prevailing Anglo-Celtic empire. Lindisfarne, Inchcolm, and Iona we generally know. Iona in Loch Erizort, Lewis, the interesting islets that stud the west coast of the latter island, the far north tiny little Rona, were in early days centres of light and religion, if not of culture. To-day the tourist finds few or none to welcome him in many of those once heaven-favoured island-homes that repose in their attractive poetic solitude and antiquarian suggestiveness on the majestic bosom of the Atlantic Ocean. But in the far-west St Kilda there still resides as monarch, priest, and judge, that zealous Free Church ordained missionary, Mr Mackay, who, according to artist Sands’s admission, bravely wrestles with all the elements, moral and physical, that conflict with the interests of man. But leaving St. Kilda in its loneliness and sailing in among the inner Hebridean Isles, we find in the fertile Island of Lismore—the great garden—a man in the fifteenth century, often now referred to in Gaelic literature, the Rev. Sir James Macgregor. A native of Perthshire, belonging to a royal clan that was afterwards “nameless by day,” with a heart filled with the enthusiasm and perfervid spirit of his countrymen, he and his brother got up a collection of the songs and ballads of their native land, which was among the first of the [literary efforts] of the kind. In Lismore also resided in later days another literary ecclesiastic, the sturdy MacNicol, who produced an able volume of obstinate Scottish prejudice, a pretty hearty, intelligent growl over the great lexicographer’s “Journey to the Hebrides.”
To Macgregor’s book we are indebted for some specimens of the poetry of his own and previous periods. Some of the votaries of the muse to whom he assigned niches of honour in his collection have been already referred to; the names of a few more, with a few specimen verses of their compositions, are here given.