Cold fall the drops of rain;
The last true-love, etc.
2
‘I’ll do as much for my fair love
As any,’ etc.
The rest “almost exactly” as b.
‘Charles Graeme,’ Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, I, 89, Motherwell’s MS., p. 624, begins with stanzas which belong to this ballad. What follows after the third, or just possibly the sixth, stanza reads as if some contributor had been diverting himself with an imposition on the editor’s simplicity. Buchan himself remarks in a note, p. 299: “There seems to be a very great inconsistency manifested throughout the whole of this ballad in the lady’s behavior towards the ghost of her departed lover. Perhaps she wished to sit and sigh alone, undisturbed with visits from the inhabitants of the grave.” (Translated by Gerhard, p. 63.)
1
‘Cauld, cauld blaws the winter night,
Sair beats the heavy rain;