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Music of the Waters. 97 |
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splendid and spirited words. Another tune that everybody knows, while but few South-countrymen have ever heard the beautiful words, ' braid Scots ;' this, it must be owned, is Mickle's ' There is nae Luck aboot the Hoose.' Yet I think no other poem in the world gives like this one the excitement, and the passion, and the half-humorous bustle of the sailor's return, nor so brings before one the life of the little seaport town. Burns called it' one of the most beautiful songs in the Scots' or any other language,' and Burns himself might have written the cry, twice repeated,—
" ' And will I see his face again ? And will I hear him speak ? I'm downright dizzy wi' the thought; In troth I'm like to greet !'
and the writer might have added the last verse found in the manuscript of William Julius Mickle's—
" ' If Colin's weel, and weel content, I hae nae mair to crave, And gin I live to mak' him sae, I'm blest aboon the lave.'
The pith of the whole story, to my mind, lies in these four unpublished lines. Why they were suppressed I know not, but it seems to me that the self-renunciation of the mariner's wife should have been given to the world along with the other verses of the poem."
The writer of these remarks, should my book ever fall into his hands, must pardon me if I contradict him, and seemingly attempt to pour cold water on his eulogistic summary of Scottish sailor-songs, with all due appreciation of Cunningham's beautiful—
" A wet sheet and a flowing sea, A wind that follows fast,
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