“We call on pleasure—and around
A mocking world repeats the sound!”
Even the emigrant seems to have forgotten his native mountains; and in the five years in which I have sojourned in America, I have not once heard “Roslin Castle” sung by a swain on a blithe summer’s day. Here they are all dull plodding farmers, as devoid of sober melody as the huge forests which surround them are void of grace and beauty: talk to them of poetry and music, and they will sit with sad civility, “as silent as Pygmalion’s wife.”
Now and then you may hear a hoarse raven of an old woodchopper in the barroom of a filthy tavern, roaring in discordant notes, “Yankee Doodle:” or, in a church or meeting-house, you may behold fifteen or twenty men and women picked out of the congregation, stuck up in a particular part of the house and singing the praises of redeeming love, with the voices of so many stentors. The affectation they display, cannot fail to disgust you: the form of godliness is present, but the power thereof is wanting.
The memory of a native Scotsman retraces back those halcyon days, when gladness filled the corn-field—when sober mirth and glee crowned the maiden feast—when the song went merrily round at Yule, to chase away the winter frosts; and coming to the day of universal rest from labour, calls to mind the venerable precentor with his well-remembered solemn tunes, where old and young, infancy and advanced age, willingly joined together in singing his praise—where the fiddle and the flute, the harp and the organ, were useless—where no set people stood up in a corner, as if to say, “we, the aristocracy of this congregation, can offer a sweeter and more acceptable sacrifice than you, with our melodious voices so much better attuned than yours.”
It may, perhaps, appear irreverend in me, to say a word of sacred music in an essay intended for Scottish songs; but I thought the contrast would not be complete without this allusion. A late essayist “On vulgar prejudices against Literature,” uses a fine argument in favour of native poetry.
“Let us ask,” says he, “has Britain a greater claim to distinction among the nations of the world, from any one circumstance, however celebrated it be in arts and arms, than from its being the birthplace of Shakspeare? And if the celebration of the anniversary of Waterloo be held in the farthest settlements of India, so is the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, the pastoral poet of Scotland:—
“Encamped by Indian rivers wild,
The soldier, resting on his arms,
In Burns’s carol sweet recalls
The scenes that blest him when a child,
And glows and gladdens at the charms
Of Scotia’s woods and waterfalls.”
When kingdoms, and states, and cities pass away, what then proves to be the most imperishable of their records, the most durable of their glories? Is it not the lay of the poet? the eloquence of the patriot? the page of the historian? Is it not the genius of the nation, imprinted on these, the most splendid of its annals, and transmitted, as a legacy, and a token of its vanished glory, to the after ages of mankind? And now, when the glories of Greece and Rome are but shadows, does not our blood stir within us at the recital of their mighty achievements, and of their majestic thoughts, which, but for the page of the chronicler would have been long ere now a blank and a vacancy; glory departed without a trace, or figures traced upon the sand, and washed away by the returns of the tide:—
“Oh! who shall lightly say that fame,
Is nothing but an empty name?
When, but for those, our mighty dead,
All ages past a blank would be,
Sunk in oblivion’s murky bed,
A desert bare, a shipless sea.
They are the distant objects seen;
The lofty marks of what hath been,
Oh! who shall lightly say that fame
Is nothing but an empty name?