Oh, look upon the prize, sirs,
That where yon heights are rising,
The whole long twelvemonth sighs in,
Because she is alone.
Go, learn it from my minstrelsy,
Who list the tale to carry,
The maiden shuns the public eye,
And is ordain'd to tarry
'Mid stoups and cans, and milking ware,
Where brown hills rear their ridges bare,
And wails her plight the livelong year,
To spend the day alone.
EVAN'S ELEGY.
Mackay was benighted on a deer-stalking expedition, near a wild hut or shealing, at the head of Loch Eriboll. Here he found its only inmate a poor asthmatic old man, stretched on his pallet, apparently at the point of death. As he sat by his bed-side, he "crooned," so as to be audible, it seems, to the patient, the following elegiac ditty, in which, it will be observed, he alludes to the death, then recent, of Pelham, an eminent statesman of George the Second's reign. As he was finishing his ditty, the old man's feelings were moved in a way which will be found in the appended note. This is one of Sir Walter Scott's extracts in the Quarterly, and is now attempted in the measure of the original.
How often, Death! art waking
The imploring cry of Nature!
When she sees her phalanx breaking,
As thou'dst have all—grim feature!
Since Autumn's leaves to brownness,
Of deeper shade were tending,
We saw thy step, from palaces,
To Evan's nook descending.
Oh, long, long thine agony!
A nameless length its tide;
Since breathless thou hast panted here,
And not a friend beside.
Thine errors what, I judge not;
What righteous deeds undone;
But if remains a se'ennight,
Redeem it, dying one!
Oh, marked we, Death! thy teachings true,
What dust of time would blind?
Such thy impartiality
To our highest, lowest kind.
Thy look is upwards, downwards shot,
Determined none to miss;
It rose to Pelham's princely bower,
It sinks to shed like this!
Oh, long, long, &c.!
So great thy victims, that the noble
Stand humbled by the bier;
So poor, it shames the poorest
To grace them with a tear.
Between the minister of state
And him that grovels there,
Should one remain uncounselled,
Is there one whom dool shall spare?
Oh, long, long, &c.!
The hail that strews the battle-field
Not louder sounds its call,
Than the falling thousands round us
Are voicing words to all.
Hearken! least of all the nameless;
Evan's hour is going fast;
Hearken! greatest of earth's great ones—
Princely Pelham's hour is past.
Oh, long, long, &c.!
Friends of my heart! in the twain we see
A type of life's declining;
'Tis like the lantern's dripping light,
At either end a-dwining.
Where was there one more low than thou—
Thou least of meanest things?[101]
And where than his was higher place
Except the throne of kings?
Oh, long, long, &c.!
DOUGAL BUCHANAN.
Dougal Buchanan was born at the Mill of Ardoch, in the beautiful valley of Strathyre, and parish of Balquhidder, in the year 1716. His parents were in circumstances to allow him the education of the parish school; on which, by private application, he so far improved, as to be qualified to act as teacher and catechist to the Highland locality which borders on Loch Rannoch, under the appointment of the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge. Never, it is believed, were the duties of a calling discharged with more zeal and efficiency. The catechist was, both in and out of the strict department of his office, a universal oracle,[102] and his name is revered in the scene of his usefulness in a degree to which the honours of canonization could scarcely have added. Pious, to the height of a proverbial model, he was withal frank, cheerful, and social; and from his extraordinary command of the Gaelic idiom, and its poetic phraseology, he must have lent an ear to many a song and many a legend[103]—a nourishment of the imagination in which, as well as in purity of Gaelic, his native Balquhidder was immeasurably inferior to the Rannoch district of his adoption.
The composition of hymns, embracing a most eloquent and musical paraphrase of many of the more striking inspirations of scriptural poetry, seems to have been the favourite employment of his leisure hours. These are sung or recited in every cottage of the Highlands where a reader or a retentive memory is to be found.