style="font-size:15px;"> I learned them in the lonely glen,The last abodes of living men;
Where never stranger came our way
By summer night, or winter day;
Where neighbouring hind or cot was none,
Our converse was with Heaven alone,
With voices through the cloud that sung,
And brooding storms that round us hung.
O Lady, judge, if judge you may,
How stern and ample was the sway
Of themes like these, when darkness fell,
And gray–hair’d sires the tales would tell!
When doors were barr’d, and eldron dame
Plied at her task beside the flame,
That through the smoke and gloom alone
On dim and umber’d faces shone—
The bleat of mountain goat on high,
That from the cliff came quavering by;
The echoing rock, the rushing flood,
The cataract’s swell, the moaning wood,
That undefined and mingled hum—
Voice of the desart, never dumb!—
All these have left within this heart
A feeling tongue can ne’er impart;
A wilder’d and unearthly flame,
A something that’s without a name.
And, Lady, thou wilt never deem
Religious tale offensive theme;
Our creeds may differ in degree,
But small that difference sure can be!
As flowers which vary in their dyes,
We all shall bloom in Paradise.
As sire who loves his children well,
The loveliest face he cannot tell,—
So ’tis with us. We are the same,
One faith, one Father, and one aim.
And had’st thou lived where I was bred,
Amid the scenes where martyrs bled,
Their sufferings all to thee endear’d
By those most honour’d and revered;
And where the wild dark streamlet raves,
Had’st wept above their lonely graves,
Thou would’st have felt, I know it true,
As I have done, and aye must do.
And for the same exalted cause,
For mankind’s right, and nature’s laws,
The cause of liberty divine,
Thy fathers bled as well as mine.
Then be it thine, O noble Maid,
On some still eve these tales to read;
And thou wilt read, I know full well,
For still thou lovest the haunted dell;
To linger by the sainted spring,
And trace the ancient fairy ring
Where moonlight revels long were held
In many a lone sequester’d field,
By Yarrow dens and Ettrick shaw,
And the green mounds of Carterhaugh.
O for one kindred heart that thought
As minstrel must, and lady ought,
That loves like thee the whispering wood,
And range of mountain solitude!
Think how more wild the greenwood scene,
If times were still as they have been;
If fairies, at the fall of even,
Down from the eye–brow of the heaven,
Or some aërial land afar,
Came on the beam of rising star;
Their lightsome gambols to renew,
From the green leaf to quaff the dew,
Or dance with such a graceful tread,
As scarce to bend the gowan’s head!
Think if thou wert, some evening still,
Within thy wood of green Bowhill—
Thy native wood!—the forest’s pride!
Lover or sister by thy side;
In converse sweet the hour to improve
Of things below and things above,
Of an existence scarce begun,
And note the stars rise one by one.
Just then, the moon and daylight blending,
To see the fairy bands descending,
Wheeling and shivering as they came,
Like glimmering shreds of human frame;
Or sailing, ’mid the golden air,
In skiffs of yielding gossamer.
O, I would wander forth alone
Where human eye hath never shone,
Away o’er continents and isles
A thousand and a thousand miles,
For one such eve to sit with thee,
Their strains to hear and forms to see!
Absent the while all fears of harm,
Secure in Heaven’s protecting arm;
To list the songs such beings sung,
And hear them speak in human
