Happily for Scotland’s people, they have the gift of song, which lightens many labors. Even on the days we visited Glencoe’s dark ravine, we heard, toward the end of the afternoon, sounds of melody from the toilers in the grain-fields. It came like a burst of sunshine after a dark and cloudy day.
This inborn love of music among the Highlanders was shown when the women reaped the grain and the men bound up the sheaves. The strokes of the sickle were timed by the modulations of the harvest song, by which all their voices were united. The sight and sound recalled the line in Campbell’s poem, “The Soldier’s Dream,” committed to memory in boyhood:—
“I heard my own mountain goats bleating aloft,
And knew the sweet strain that the corn reapers sung.”
“They accompany in the Highlands every action, which can be done in equal time, with an appropriate strain, which has, they say, not much meaning, but the effects are regularity and cheerfulness,” writes the historian of Scottish music. The ancient song, by which the rowers of galleys were animated, may be supposed to have been of this metrical kind and synchronous. There is an oar song still used by the Hebridians, and we all recall the boat song in “The Lady of the Lake,” which begins:—
“Hail to the chief who in triumph advances.”
Finely, in “Marmion,” is the story of rhythmic motion joined to song to lighten labor, told by Fitz-Eustace, the squire, concerning the lost battle, on which Scott comments, with an American reference:—
“Such have I heard, in Scottish land,
Rise from the busy harvest band,
When falls before the mountaineer,