The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

Social Life of the Borders.
part of this country, or of any other country, can, I think,
shew so proud a poetic record. There are few thini^si
indeed, more mar\-ellous than the flood of song which has
poured o\-er it, and its unbroken continuity. Looking,
indeed, at the long Hst of singers who crowd every vale, it
reminds us of the companies of those birds, " blythesome and
cumberless," so often their delight and inspiration, hanging
and fluttering in joyful crowds over the meadows in the
brightness of the rising day, and rivally echoing each other.
Throughout the country, and it is, perhaps, one of the
most striking and hopeless signs of the times, no new poets
have appeared to replace the great names which filled our
literature during the period I have been dealing with. The
one great living poet must be looked upon as of the past
generation, and of the other two who bulk so largely before
the public, the one requires societies for his interpretation,
and substitutes mere craft of words for power, whilst the
other, founding upon foreign models, has substituted rhetoric
for the natural flow of English verse, and pruriency for
passion. For a time, also, the voice of the Forest is silent,
but when the new poetic awakening occurs, one will leave the
mere artifices and affectations ot sentiment and language
and turn again for inspiration to nature, and to those
gentler feelings, and that abiding pathos, the expression of
which not only constitutes their chief beauty and attraction,
but in which resides the permanency of the poetry of the
Border Land.