And what can surpass many of the Shepherd's songs? The most undefinable of all undefinable kinds of poetical inspiration are surely--Songs. They seem to start up indeed from the dew-sprinkled soil of a poet's soul, like flowers; the first stanza being root, the second leaf, the third bud, and all the rest blossom, till the song is like a stalk laden with its own beauty, and laying itself down in languid delight on the soft bed of moss--song and flower alike having the same "dying fall!"
A fragment! And the more piteous because a fragment. Go in search of the pathetic, and you will find it tear-steeped, sigh-breathed, moan-muttered, and groaned in fragments. The poet seems often struck dumb by woe--his heart feels that suffering is at its acme--and that he should break off and away from a sight too sad to be longer looked on--haply too humiliating to be disclosed. So, too, it sometimes is with the beautiful. The soul in its delight seeks to escape from the emotion that oppresses it--is speechless--and the song falls mute. Such is frequently the character--and the origin of that character--of our auld Scottish Sangs. In their mournfulness are they not almost like the wail of some bird distracted on the bush from which its nest has been harried, and then suddenly flying away for ever into the woods? In their joyfulness, are they not almost like the hymn of some bird, that love-stricken suddenly darts from the tree-top down to the caresses that flutter through the spring? And such, too, are often the airs to which those dear auld sangs are sung. From excess of feeling--fragmentary; or of one divine part to which genius may be defied to conceive another, because but one hour in all time could have given it birth.
You may call this pure nonsense--but 'tis so pure that you need not fear to swallow it. All great song-writers, nevertheless, have been great thieves. Those who had the blessed fate to flourish first--to be born when "this auld cloak was new,"--the cloak we mean which nature wears--scrupled not to creep upon her as she lay asleep beneath the shadow of some single tree among
"The grace of forest woods decay'd, And pastoral melancholy,"
and to steal the very pearls out of her hair--out of the silken snood which enamoured Pan himself had not untied in the Golden Age. Or if she ventured, as sometimes she did, to walk along the highways of the earth, they robbed her in the face of day of her dew-wrought reticule--without hurting, however, the hand from which they brushed that net of gossamer.