'A ferlie he spied wi' his e'e; And there he saw a ladye bright Come riding down by the Eildon Tree,'
was one that many heroes of adventure, before him and after him, have made in fairy lands forlorn. The scenery and incidents of that strange ride are also among the common possessions of fairy romance. One dimly discerns in them the glimmer of an ancient allegory, of an old cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, winding and fern-sown, that leads to 'fair Elfland.' There is a glimpse of the Garden of the Hesperides and its fruits; and a lurid peep into Hades:
'It was mirk, mirk nicht and nae starlicht, And they waded through red bluid to the knee; For a' the bluid that 's shed on earth Rins through the springs o' that countrie.'
The Palace of Truth as well as of Error is built on fairy ground; and there is a foretaste of Gilbertian humour in the dismay with which the Rhymer hears that he is to be endowed with 'the tongue that can never lie.'
'"My tongue is mine ain," True Thomas said; "A goodlie gift you would give me; I neither dought to buy or sell At fair or tryst where I may be; I dought neither speak to prince or peer Nor ask of grace from fair ladye."'
But from his seven years' wanderings in fairyland, that speed like a day upon earth, he wakens up as from a dream, and again he is laid on Huntlie bank, in sight of the cleft Eildon.
Is it not significant that Melrose and Abbotsford, where a later and greater wizard wrought his spells over the valley of the Tweed and Ettrick Forest, should be half-way between the chief scenes of our Fairy Ballads--between the Rhymer's Tower and Carterhaugh? Fair Janet's conduct, when forbidden to come or go by Carterhaugh, where Yarrow holds tryst with Ettrick, lest she might encounter the Young Tamlane, may be traced back to the Garden of Eden, and is of a piece with that of Mother Eve:
'Janet has kilted her green kirtle A little abune her knee; And she has braided her yellow hair A little abune her bree; And she 's awa' to Carterhaugh As fast as she could gae.'