[78] [“—The ACCUSING SPIRIT flew up to heaven’s chancery with the oath, and blushed as he gave it in—the RECORDING ANGEL, as he wrote it down, dropped a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever!”—Sterne. Ed.]
Highland Legend.
The following poem originates in a legend which is still popular in many parts of the highlands of Scotland: that a female branch of the noble family of Douglas contracted an imprudent marriage with a kerne, or mountain peasant, who was drowned in the Western Islands, where he had escaped for concealment from the persecutions of the offended family of his wife. She survived him eighteen years, and wandered a maniac over the mountains, where, as superstition alleges, she is even now to be seen at daybreak. The stanzas are supposed to be the extempore recitations of an old bard to a group of attentive villagers.
THE LADY OF THE HILL.
Poor girl! she seem’d of an unearthly mould,
A thing superior to the frowns of fate;
But never did my tearful eyes behold
A maid so fair, and so disconsolate;
Yet was she once a child of high estate,
And nurst in splendour, till an envious gloom
Sunk her beneath its harsh o’erpowering weight:
Robb’d her pale features of their orient bloom,
And with a noiseless pace, mov’d onwards to the tomb.
She walk’d upon the earth, as one who knew
The dread mysterious secrets of the grave;
For never o’er her eye of heav’nly blue
Lighten’d a smile; but like the ocean wave
That roars, unblest with sunshine, through the cave
Rear’d in the depths of Snowden, she had flown
To endless grief for refuge; and would rave,
And tell to the night-winds her tale unknown,
Or wander o’er the heath, deserted and alone.
And when the rain beat hard against the hill,
And storms rush’d by upon their wing of pow’r,
Lonely she’d stray beside the bubbling rill,
Or fearless list the deep-voic’d cataract’s roar;
And when the tempest’s wrath was heard no more
She wander’d home, the mountain sod to dress
With many a wreath, and many a summer flow’r:
And thus she liv’d, the sister of distress,
The solitude of love, nurst in the wilderness.
She was the child of nature; earth, sea, sky,
Mountain and cataract, fern-clad hill and dale
Possess’d a nameless charm in her young eye,
Pure and eternal, for in Deva’s vale
Her heart first listen’d to a lover’s tale,
Breath’d by a mountain kerne; and every scene
That wanton’d blithely in the od’rous gale,
Had oft beheld her lord’s enamour’d mien,
As tremblingly she sought each spot where he had been.