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this training in the dexterities of the pen, fitted himself for an appointment in the General Register House, Edinburgh; but having entered into the married state, and finding the salary of subordinate officials in that establishment insufficient for the comfortable maintenance of his family, he transported himself, in the year 1822, to America, where he engaged in various farming and manufacturing schemes. Like Ballantine, he knew to combine the effective performance of the duties of a business life with the devout worship of the Muse. At Redfield, New York, in the year 1855, he published two volumes of Scottish songs and ballads, which will secure him a high place among the lyric poets of his country; and he died at Louisville in the year 1878, in the eighty-sixth year of his age, adding another proof to the many already brought forward in these pages, of the falsity of the vulgar notion that poets die young. If they die young sometimes, as they will do, like other people, it will not be because they have more vitality to expend, but because they do not spend it wisely. In the song as we now give it, and with which we conclude this short chapter, let the reader note the vivid dramatic picturesqueness of the descriptive lines-lines worthy of Homer, and which were not surpassed by Burns in his most favoured hour:

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It's no' when the yawl an' the light skiffs crawl
Owre the breast o' the siller sea,

That I look to the west for the bark I lo'e best,

An' the rover that's dear to me.

But when that the clud lays its cheeks to the flood,
An' the sea lays its shouther to the shore;
When the win' sings high, an' the sea-whaups cry
As they rise frae the whitening roar.

It's then that I look to the thickening rook,
An' watch by the midnight tide;

I ken the wind brings my rover hame,
An' the sea that he glories to ride.

O merry he sits 'mang his jovial crew
Wi' the helm-heft in his hand;

An' he sings aloud to his boys in blue,
As his ee's upon Galloway's land.

Unstent an' slack each reef an' tack,
Gie her sail, boys, while it may sit;
She has roar'd through a heavier sea afore,
An' she'll roar through a heavier yet.
When landsmen sleep, or wake an' creep,
In the tempest's angry moan,

We dash through the drift, an' sing to the lift
O' the wave that heaves us on.

CHAPTER VII.

SONGS OF THOUGHT AND SENTIMENT.

'Imprimis hominis est propria veri inquisitio atque indagatio; ex quod intelligitur, quod verum, simplex sincerumque sit, id esse -naturæ hominis aptissimum: Huic veri videndi cupiditati adjuncta est appetitio quædam principatus, ex quo animi magnitudo, humanarumque verum contemptio."-CICERO.

By songs of thought and sentiment, I mean songs of which the object and the purpose, not merely the atmosphere, the situation, and the incidents, are a thought, sentiment, idea, or principle, what in the formal language of the schools might be called a proposition. Of course, there is no reason why any great moral truth, or elevating human idea, should not take the form of a song: in the oldest Greek times all wisdom was clothed in verse; and didactic poetry was as legitimate as any other form of rhythmical expression.1 But in the course of time, when the minstrel

"Quis ignorat musicen tantum antiquis temporibus non studii modo, verum etiam venerationis habuisse, ut iidem musici, et vates, et sapientes judicarentur."—Quinctilian, i. 10.

had ceased to be the only popular instructor, and a distinctly marked prose literature, from Pherecydes of Syros downwards, had asserted its separate position, philosophical ideas or great pervading principles of the universe, and forces of society, were formally set forth in prose; while the impassioned and dramatic expression of the principle in the actual encounters and conflicts of life was left in the hands of the singer. So little, however, did the modern idea of drawing a broad line of demarcation betwixt instruction and song receive acknowledgment from the Greek mind, that even in the most flourishing period of Attic prose, the choral ode, which was the most effective element in the Greek drama, had, both as respects substance and attitude, more in it of what we should call a sermon than a song. The formal intention to teach as in a modern lecture or sermon, is indeed wanting in all song properly so called; nevertheless the solemn chorus in the 'Eumenides' of Æschylus, beginning with—

"Mother Night, that bore me,
A scourge to go before thee,”

is as much a sermon on conscience as any ever preached by the most serious gospeller in a Christian pulpit. And in the same way, the choral ode in the 'Antigone' of Sophocles, starting from the sentence

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