Where memory of the mighty dead
To earth-worn pilgrims’ wistful eye
The brightest rays of cheering shed,
That point to immortality.”
The blue hills and mountains, among which Byron first caught the enthusiasm of song; the green vallies and brown heaths where Scott learnt to tell of Flodden field, and deeds of other days, in verse, lasting as the source of the deep Niagara, yet return an echo to the well-known “Daintie Davie” of Robert Burns.
As down the burn they took their way,
And through the flowery dale,
His cheek to hers he aft did lay,
And love was aye the tale.
With “Mary, when shall we return,
Sic pleasure to renew?”
Quoth Mary, “Love, I like the burn,
And aye shall follow you.”
How I should delight to hear such an artless tale sung on the braes of Queenston, or the green knowes and fertile plains around Ancaster.
I once in Montreal heard a gentleman from little York (a native of Perthshire) sing “Daintie Davie” in fine style; but it was the old set, and as it is a very good song, I think the first stanza and chorus may “drive dull care away” from half a dozen of my readers as well as a good hit at that silly body, our sapient attorney-general, or a squib at his forkhead Mr. Solicitor, would have done:—
“Now rosy May comes in wi’ flowers
To deck her gay green spreading bowers,
And now comes in my happy hours,
To wander wi’ my Davie.
Chorus.
“Meet me on the warlock knowe,
Daintie Davie, Daintie Davie,
There I’ll spend the day with you,
My ain dear Daintie Davie.”
About two years ago, I wrote to a correspondent in Scotland, to send to Dundas about ten reams of our best Scottish, English, and Irish ballads, and to avoid any that were exceptionable in point of morality. This person has since arrived in America; but his ideas on the propriety of introducing ballads into a new country, I found to be different from mine—otherwise I had by this time employed several “wights of Homer’s craft” to disperse the twenty thousand halfpenny songs I then ordered. It would have, perhaps, sown the seeds of music in our land, and hundreds of American presses, may be, would have spread abundantly the pleasing stanzas, until accursed slavery had stopt the strain in the southern regions of republican tyranny.