An’ weary o’ life is the Harper o’ Mull.
“As slumbering I lay by the dark mountain stream,
My lovely young Rosie appeared in my dream;
I thocht her still kind, and I ne’er was sae blest
As in fancy I clasped the fair Nymph to my breast.
Thou fause, fleeting vision, too soon thou were o’er,
Thou wak’d’st me to tortures unequalled before,
But death’s silent slumbers my grief soon shall lull,
An’ the green grass wave o’er the Harper o’ Mull.”
The transition from the harp to the bagpipe was spread over about two centuries. In 1565 George Buchanan speaks of the Highlanders using both instruments, and during the seventeenth century the use of the harp declined to such an extent that the number of professional harpers was very small indeed. The civil wars largely accounted for this, as the fitness of the bagpipe for the tumult of battle gave it an easy superiority over the harp. Writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Alexander Macdonald, the Keppoch bard, said he preferred the pipes to the harp, which he called ceol nionag, maidens’ music. When the bards thus openly avowed their liking for the pipes, the transition period was over, for the harp was wont to be their favourite instrument. The harp still exists as the clarsach, which is being revived by Highland Associations, more especially in Glasgow, but, if the Irishism may be permitted, the bagpipe is now “the harp of the Gael.”