’S their iad—guileag-doro-hidola-hann
Dh-fhalbh an geamhra’s tha’n samhradh air teachd!”
The lines of Du Bartas have little meaning in themselves, and are untranslatable, being simply an attempt on the poet’s part, in some odd moment of hilarity and abandon, to embody the notes of the skylark’s song in something like articulate verse. The general sense of Macdonald’s lines describing the irrepressible inclination of all living creatures to be jubilant and joyous at the return of spring, cannot better be rendered than in the first part of Scott’s introductory stanza to the second canto of the Lady of the Lake, only that the return of spring in the one case, instead of the return of morn in the other, prompts to the outburst of gladness and song:—
“At morn the black-cock trims his jetty wing,
’Tis morning prompts the linnet’s blithest lay,
All Nature’s children feel the matin spring
Of life reviving, with reviving day;
And while yon little bark glides down the bay,
Wafting the stranger on his way again,
Morn’s genial influence roused a minstrel grey,