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Show SCOTTISH SONGS. Every way you take them, - in authorship, in sentiment, in tone, in language, - they are the creation and property of the people. And if educated men and high-born ladies, and even some of Scotland's kings, have added to the store, it was only because they had lived familiarly among the peasantry, felt as they felt, and spoken their language that they were enabled to sing strains that their country's heart would not disown. For the whole character of these melodies, various as they are, is so peculiar and so pronounced that the smallest foreign element introduced, one word out of keeping, grates on the ear and mars the music. Scottish song has both a spirit and a frame-work framework of its own, within which it rigorously keeps. Into that frame-work framework, these molds, it is wonderful how much deep and tender human heartedness can be poured. But so entirely unique is the inner spirit, as well as the outward setting, that no one, not even Burns, could stretch it beyond its compass without your being at once aware of the falsetto note. It was the glory of Burns that, taking the old form of the Scottish song as his instrument he was able to elicit from it so much. That Burns was the creator of Scottish song, no one would have denied more vehemently than himself. When he appeared, in 1786, as the national poet of his country, the tide of popular taste was running strong in favor of Scottish song. He took up that tide of feeling, or rather he was taken up by it, and he carried it to its height. He was nurtured in a home that was full of song. His mother's memory was stored with old tunes or songs of her country, and she sang them to her oldest boy from this cradle-time all through his boyhood. Amid multifarious reading of his early years, the book he most prized was an old song book which he carried with him wherever he went, ??? ??? it, he says, as he drove his cart or walked to labor, song by song, verse by verse, carefully distinguishing the true, tender, or sublime from affectation and ???. Thus he learned his song-craft song craft and his critic-craft critic craft together. The earliest poem he composed was in his seventeenth summer, a simple love-song love song in praise of a girl who was his companion as a reaper in the harvest field. The last strain he breathed was from his death-bed death bed in remembrance of some former affection. -- J.C. Shairp, in Atlantic. |