Mother of Burns! thy woe-nursed bard Mother! thy doric speech hath power Who dipp'd his words in lightning? Who Terse, terrible, sublime? Who bade thy bard, in thrall, maintain Proud Fashion's Minstrels? God. God.* But with torture Faction fill'd The cup he drain'd in gloomy pride: What marvel, if the poison kill'd? What marvel, if he died? Few were his days, his fortunes foul; * See Coleridge's Hymn to Sunrise. SCOTSMEN TO SCOTLAND. 223 And with a poet's glowing soul, Drew near to God in song. For Conscience to thy poet said, With little men he might not stay, Oh, guess the worth he threw away, And what a wreath his fame had worn, Had he, like England's Milton, borne But shall it of our sires be told That they their "brother poor" forsook? They bought the brave man's Book! Scotland! thy sons-and not unearn'd And oft again, the kind, the brave, Who sorrow's feast, like him, have shared, Will meet, to honour in his grave Thy glorious rustic bard. Oh, spare his frailties !-write them not On mute Misfortune's coffin-lid !— Ev'n Bacon err'd, and greater Scott A fearful gift is flame from heav'n, ERIN, A DIRGE, FOR APRIL, 1847. OH, for snow, strange April snow, There are colder things than snow, Proud Rapine's cold hard-heartedness! And that saddest, helpless pain Which, when struck, strikes not again! Insect, that would'st God enthrall! ERIN, A DIRGE, FOR APRIL, 1847. Art thou thy country's nothingness? How men treat subjected man, Well knows scourged India's wofulness; Oh, thou snow-clad forest-bough! In thy sun-lit glory now, Laugh not at death's wide wastefulness; But lament, while brightly glows A nation dead and coffinless! 225 And-oh! pale unshrouded one, A white sheet now shall cover thee: Help is vain, but help is nigh; And thy friend, the pitying sky Shall throw a cold sheet over thee. VOL. II. Q 226 RHYMED RAMBLES. IN THREE PARTS. PREFACE. IF Mr. Housman of Lune Banks had not sent me a copy of his collection of English sonnets, I should have been the author of one sonnet only. I never liked the measure of the legitimate or Petrarchan sonnet. There is a disagreeable break in the melody, after the eighth line. That Milton felt this, is proved by the fact, that he frequently ran the eighth line into the ninth, contrary to law. Nor can I agree with Mr. Housman, that a sonnet ending with a couplet is therefore faulty; on the contrary, a couplet at the close of a sonnet has often a fine effect. So thought and so proved Cowper, and our elder poets; and there are in Mr. Housman's collection five most harmonious, yet not Petrarchan sonnets, by Fitzadam, composed of three elegiac stanzas and a couplet, all disconnected in rhyme, but not in metre; which fully show that the measure of the sonnet, as he has managed it, is as proper for a long and serious poem as the Spenserian stanza itself. The sonnet, I believe, has become popular in those languages only in which it is more difficult to avoid similar rhymes than to find them. The Spenserian stanza, requiring four rhymes, is quite as difficult as the Petrarchan sonnet, the latter being little more than a series of couplets and triplets; and I venture to suggest that— preceded by five lines, linked to it in melody, and concluding occasionally with an Alexandrine-or preceded by four lines only, if concluding with a triplet—the far-famed measure of Spenser is the best which the English sonneteer can employ. Of this the reader may judge for himself; as, in these sonnets, (if sonnets they are,) I have used the legitimate, the Spenserian, and other forms. |