I can call to mind the time, as well as if it were yesterday, when I first heard “The Maid of Lodi:” it was at a Scottish wedding, at Arthurstone. Sir Ewan, the aged sire of the brave colonel Cameron, who fell at Waterloo, was present with his lady; and, gentle reader, I think it was the youthful minister of the next parish who sung, accompanied by the bride’s youngest sister. It was followed by “Blythe, blythe,” which I must give the reader from memory. News is scarce this week—the king of France is dead, and surely the tidings of the next’s coronation will not arrive in time to fill a paragraph in the “Advocate” for a month to come—so let us have—
Blythe, blythe and merry was she:
Blythe was she but and ben;
Blythe by the banks of Ern—
Blythe in Glenturret glen.
By Aughtertye grows the aik,
By Yarrow banks the birken shaw;
But Phemie was the bonniest lass
The flowers of Yarrow ever saw.
Blythe, blythe, &c.
Her looks were like a flower in May,
Her smile was like a simmer morn;
She tripped by the banks of Ern,
As light’s a bird upon a thorn.
Blythe, blythe, &c.
Her bonnie face it was sae maek
As ony lamb upon a lee:
The evening sun was ne’er so sweet
As was the blink o’ Phemie’s e’e
Blythe, blythe, &c.
The highland hills I’ve wander’d wide,
And o’er the lowlands I hae been;
But Phemie was the bonniest lass
That ever trode the dewy green
Blythe, blythe, &c.
A young farmer then gave us “The Lothian Lassie;” and as my recollection is pretty good, I shall put Canadian Scots girls in the way to mind it as well as me, by repeating the first stanza: would I could sing it as I have heard it sung:—
Last May a braw wooer cam’d down the lang glen,
And sair wi’ his love he did deave me;
I said there was naething I hated like men,
The deuce gae wi’ ’m to believe me, believe me,
The deuce gae wi’ ’m to believe me.
What a chaste pleasure—what a gladdening influence over the most stoical mind, any of the following songs yield, when well sung to their own tunes, by a half dozen young ladies in the parlour, or by a chorus of bonnie lassies in the kitchen, as the former pursue their sewing and knitting, and the latter birr their wheels, and stir the sowens in an evening, in the opulent farmer’s dwelling; or when heard in the most humble cottage of a Scottish peasant. Well might the farmer’s dog, Luath, say, “And I for e’en down joy hae barkit wi’ them.”
Let these classes come to Upper Canada to-morrow, and they will tire of its dulness. Nature’s face is fair enough; but after the traveller leaves the last faint sounds of the Canadian boatsman’s song, as it dies on the still waters of the St. Lawrence, music will be done with.—I had forgotten however, I must now quote the songs alluded to; and I well can from memory:—