He made and loveth all.”
We love The Posie of Burns for its own sake, but we love it all the more, perhaps, because our attention was first directed to its sweet simplicity and tender beauty by one of our earliest and kindest friends, himself a poet of no mean order, the late Professor William Tennant, author of Anster Fair, in all its fantastical gaiety and homely mirth the most original poem, perhaps, to be found in the literature of our country.
A gentleman who resides at present in Cheltenham, a cadet of one of the oldest and most respectable families on the West Coast, and himself the head of a house not unknown in Highland story, has been so good as to send us a short Gaelic poem in manuscript, with a request that we should give an English version of it. With this request we very readily comply, such a task being to us a labour of love; the poem itself, besides, being very beautiful, and the history of its composition extremely interesting, as throwing some light on the manners and customs of the olden times. The following prefatory note from the MS. itself sufficiently explains the origin of this quaint and curious Hebridean Epithalamium:—“It was the custom in the West Highlands of Scotland in the olden time to meet the bride coming forth from her chamber with her maidens on the morning after her marriage, and to salute her with a poetical blessing called Beannachadh Bàird. On the occasion of the marriage of the Rev. Donald Macleod of Durinish, in the Isle of Skye, this practice having then got very much into desuetude, and none being found prepared to salute his bride agreeably to it, he himself came forward and received her with the following beautiful address.” We present our readers with the original lines verbatim et literatim, precisely as they stand in the MS., only omitting two lines that are partly illegible from their falling into the sharp foldings of the sheet. The sense and tenor of these lines, however, we have ventured to guess at and to incorporate with our English version:—
Beannachadh Bàird.
Mìle fàilte dhuit le ’d bhrèid,
Fad’ a rè gu’n robh thu slàn,
Moran laithean dhuit as sìth,
Le d’ mhaitheas as le d’ nì ’bhith fàs.
A chulaidh cheiteas a chaidh suas.
’S tric a thairin buaidh air mnaoi—