An up then crew the grey;
Her lover vanishd in the air,
An she gaed weepin away.
78. The Unquiet Grave.
P. 236 b. Add: Waldau’s Böhmische Granaten, II, 121, No 176.
236 f., III, 512 f. The Rev. S. Baring-Gould has recovered several copies of ‘The Unquiet Grave’ in the West Country. It will be observed that the variations in this ballad do not take a wide range. The verses are not always sung in the same order; there is not story enough to keep them in place. Mr Baring-Gould informs me that there is a Devon popular tale which is very similar (possibly a prose version of the ballad). In this, a bramble-leaf comes between the lips of the maiden and her dead lover, and her life is saved thereby. This tale is utilized in the ballad as printed in Songs of the West, No 6, ‘Cold blows the wind, sweetheart!’
H
a. Sent Rev. S. Baring-Gould by Mrs Gibbons, daughter of the late Sir W. L. Trelawney, as she remembered it sung by her nurse, Elizabeth Doidge, a woman of the neighborhood of Brentor, about 1828. b. Obtained by the same from John Woodrich, blacksmith, parish of Thrustleton, as heard from his grandmother about 1848. c. By the same, from Anne Roberts, Scobbeter.
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