EDMUND'S SONG. [From Rokeby.] O, Brignall banks are wild and fair, And as I rode by Dalton-hall. A Maiden on the castle wall Chorus. 'O, Brignall banks are fresh and fair, 'If, maiden, thou would'st wend with me. To leave both tower and town, Thou first must guess what life lead we, That dwell by dale and down: And if thou canst that riddle read, As read full well you may, Then to the greenwood shalt thou speed, As blithe as Queen of May.' Chorus. Yet sung she, 'Brignal banks are fair, 'I read you, by your bugle-horn, I read you for a ranger sworn, 'A ranger, lady, winds his horn, His blast is heard at merry morn, Chorus. Yet sung she, 'Brignall banks are fair, I would I were with Edmund there, 'With burnished brand and musketoon, So gallantly you come, I read you for a bold dragoon, That lists the tuck of drum.'— But when the beetle sounds his hum, Chorus. And, O though Brignall banks be fair, Yet mickle must the maiden dare, 'Maiden! a nameless life I lead, A nameless death I'll die; The fiend, whose lantern lights the mead, And when I'm with my comrades met, What once we were we all forget, Chorus. 'Yet Brignall banks are fresh and fair, Would grace a summer queen.'— COUNTY GUY. [From Quentin Durward.] Ah! County Guy, the hour is nigh, The sun has left the lea, The orange-flower perfumes the bower, The lark, his lay who trill'd all day, Breeze, bird, and flower, confess the hour, The village maid steals through the shade, To beauty shy, by lattice high, The star of Love, all stars above, Now reigns o'er earth and sky; And high and low the influence know— THE VIOLET. Published in the Edinburgh Annual Register for 1808.] The violet in her greenwood bower, Where birchen boughs with hazels mingle, May boast itself the fairest flower In glen, or copse, or forest dingle. Though fair her gems of azure hue, Beneath the dewdrop's weight reclining. I've seen an eye of lovelier blue, More sweet through watery lustre shining The summer sun that dew shall dry, Ere yet the day be past its morrow; Nor longer in my false love's eye JOANNA BAILLIE. [BORN at Bothwell Manse, Lanarkshire, Sept. 11, 1762; came to live in London, 1784. Published Plays on the Passions, vol. i., 1798; vol. ii., 1802; vol. iii., 1812; Miscellaneous Dramas, 1804; The Family Legend, 1810; Dramas, 3 vols., 1836; Fugitive Verses, 1840. Died at Hampstead, Feb. 23, 1851.] In reading Joanna Baillie's poetry we find her to possess a quickness of observation that nearly supplies the place of insight; a strongly moralised temperament delighting in natural things; a vigorous, simple style. These are not especially dramatic qualities, and although she won her reputation through her plays, the poetry by which she is remembered is chiefly of a pastoral kind. She described herself, with justice, as 'a poet of a simple and homely character,' and her truest poems deal with simple and homely things had she not persuaded herself that she possessed a more ambitious vocation she could have taken an honourable place among idyllic poets. About the year 1790 Miss Baillie published her first little book of poems. It met with little notice, being, as she said, too rustic for those times when Mr. Hayley and Miss Seward were the chief poets south of the Tweed. Before the publication of her next work the great wave of German romanticism had burst on our literature, an impulse inspiring Scott and Southey with the spirit of heroic chivalry, and moving even this quiet singer of woods and fields to tell of supernatural horrors and of 'the great explosions of Passion.' In 1798 appeared the earliest volume of a 'Series of Plays, in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind -each passion being the subject of a tragedy and a comedy.' These dramas are noticeable for the sustained vigour of their style and for the beautiful lyrics with which they are interspersed, but they have neither passion, interest, nor character. Few women possess the faculty of construction, and Joanna Baillie was not one of these; nor had she qualities rare enough to cover the sins of a wandering story. Even in the revelation of a passion she is Inore occupied with the moral to be inferred than with the feeling itself, and few of her dramatis persone are more than the means to bring the moral to its conclusion. Late in life Miss Baillie pro duced a book of Metrical Legends in the style of Scott, but without his fine romance and fervour, and quite at the end of her career she republished her earliest poems with the addition of some Scottish songs under the title of Fugitive Verses. The little book, with its modest name and prefaced apology, is nevertheless the most enduring of her works. Her country songs, written in the language of her early home, have the best qualities of Scottish national poetry; their simplicity, their cautious humour, endeared them at once to the national heart; they have the shrewdness and the freshness of the morning airs, the homeliness of unsophisticated feeling. Such songs as Woo'd and Married and a', The weary pund o' Tow, My Nanny O, and the lovely trysting song beginning 'The gowan glitters on the sward' are among the treasures of Scottish minstrelsy. Only less delightful than these are her earlier sketches of country life, of cottage homes on summer and on winter days, of husbandman and housewife, of lovers happy and unhappy, of idle little village girls and boys-sketches touched with a certain homely grace whose greatest charm is its sincerity. Among these poems are a series of Farewells-the melancholy, the cheerfultempered, the proud lover, each bids in turn an adieu to his mistress. Last of all comes the 'poetical or sound-hearted' lover, and even while we smile at the unusual synonym we remember how natural a truth it must have been to her that used it. A. MARY F. ROBINSON. |