The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border

Fair Helen, again, is a poem of great tender ness and beauty; and The Flowers of the Forest has a haunting charm of its own in a more delicate and modern way. But another brief ballad (also lamenting F lodden) was worthier than the last, we think, of a place in Palgrave's famous anthology. The Laird qlmujrhead is very brief, and it is practically unknown. We have set it next to The Flowers of the Forest in the present volume, so that the reader can make his own comparison. It is unknown to the anthologist; yet for Simple truth and almost Shakespearean sincerity and power of expression it is surely worthy of a place in any representative collection of English poetry. There is very little poetry outside Shakespeare in which such words as budge and pith are used with natural force and passion; and when a poet uses them as to the manner born it means, in certain rare circumstances, that he is writing from the heart of a language, perhaps from the heart of a people, and sometimes he will produce something as stirring as the Laird of Muirhead.

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