THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
Page: 4

keen and remote poetry:


"O the broom, the bonnie, bonnie broom,
The broom of Cowdenknowes!"


Perhaps some hand will gather all such precious fragments as these
together one day, freed from what is alien in the work of the
restorer. It is inexplicable that a generation resolved to forbid
the restoration of ancient buildings should approve the eighteenth
century restoration of ancient poems; nay, the architectural
"restorer" is immeasurably the more respectful. In order to give
us again the ancient fragments, it is happily not necessary to
break up the composite songs which, since the time of Burns, have
gained a national love. Let them be, but let the old verses be
also; and let them have, for those who desire it, the solitariness
of their state of ruin. Even in the cases--and they are not few--
where Burns is proved to have given beauty and music to the ancient
fragment itself, his work upon the old stanza is immeasurably finer
than his work in his own new stanzas following, and it would be
less than impiety to part the two.

I have obeyed a profound conviction which I have reason to hope
will be more commended in the future than perhaps it can be now, in
leaving aside a multitude of composite songs--anachronisms, and
worse than mere anachronisms, as I think them to be, for they patch
wild feeling with sentiment of the sentimentalist. There are some
exceptions. The one fine stanza of a song which both Sir Walter
Scott and Burns restored is given with the restorations of both,
those restorations being severally beautiful; and the burden,
"Hame, hame, hame," is printed with the Jacobite song that carries
it; this song seems so mingled and various in date and origin that
no apology is needed for placing it amongst the bundle of Scottish
ballads of days before the Jacobites. Sir Patrick Spens is treated
here as an ancient song. It is to be noted that the modern, or
comparatively modern, additions to old songs full of quantitative
metre--"Hame, hame, hame," is one of these--full of long notes,
rests, and interlinear pauses, are almost always written in
anapaests. The later writer has slipped away from the fine,