And syne he kissed her rosy lips—
There was nae breath within.
The resemblance of these verses to several of the preceding ballads, [ [21] ] and particularly to Sir Patrick Spence, and their superiority in delicacy of feeling and in diction to all ordinary ballad poetry, is very striking. It chances that there is here, as in Sir Patrick, one word peculiarly detective—namely, strand, as meaning the shore. In the Scottish language, strand means a rivulet, or a street-gutter—never the margin of the sea.
There is a considerable number of other ballads which are scarcely less liable to suspicion as modern compositions, and which are all marked more or less by the peculiarities seen in the above group. Several of them are based, like the one just noticed, on irregular love, which they commonly treat with little reproach, and usually with a romantic tenderness. Willie and May Margaret [ [22] ] describes a young lover crossing the Clyde in a flood to see his mistress, and as denied access by her mother in a feigned voice, after which he is drowned in recrossing the river; the ballad being thus a kind of counterpart of the Lass of Lochryan. In Young Huntin, otherwise called Earl Richard, the hero is killed in his mistress's bower through jealousy, and we have then a verse of wonderful power—such as no rustic and unlettered bard ever wrote, or ever will write:
'O slowly, slowly wanes the night,
And slowly daws the day:
There is a dead man in my bower,
I wish he were away.'
One called Fair Annie relates how a mistress won upon her lover, and finally gained him as a husband, by patience, under the trial of seeing a new bride brought home. [ [23] ] In the latter, the behaviour of the patient mistress is thus described:
O she has served the lang tables