Nae mair your frowns can fear me,
For the flowers of the forest are a’ wede away.
The words are beautiful, and instinct with sorrow when spoken or sung. But it is the music of the pipes that gives them supreme interpretation, and makes them the expression of grief so profound that “The Flowers of the Forest” has become the national dirge. Nor is sorrow their only note.
The pipes can sound—and have sounded on many a stricken field and in many an hour of despair—the triumph of hope and of victory over death. They have stirred the blood and cleared the head, and given strength to the arm of many a soldier who has never dreamed of the eagle plume blended with the heather and never heard through the mists of memory the clash of the broadsword on the targe—
I hear the pibroch sounding
Deep o’er the mountain glen,
While light springing footsteps are trampling the heath—
’Tis the march of the Cameron men.
(2135)
MUSIC OF NATURE