"Oh, luve will venture in where it daurna weel be seen; Oh, luve will venture in, where wisdom ance has been; But I will down yon river rove, amang the wood sae green-- And a' to pu' a posie to my ain dear May.
"The primrose I will pu', the firstling o' the year, And I will pu' the pink, the emblem o' my dear; For she's the pink o' womankind, and blooms without a peer-- And a' to be a posie to my ain dear May.
"The lily it is pure, and the lily it is fair, And in her lovely bosom I'll place the lily there; The daisy's for simplicity and unaffected air-- And a' to be a posie to my ain dear May.
"The hawthorn I will pu', wi' its locks o' siller grey, Where, like an aged man, it stands at break o' day; But the songster's nest within the bush I winna tak away-- And a' to be a posie to my ain dear May."
Mark that line in italics, and ponder its exquisite tenderness. How it must have irradiated, like a sudden flood of sunshine over a mountain landscape, the poet's heart as he penned it! Here you have the germ of the doctrine afterwards more broadly taught by Coleridge in the well-known lines of the Ancient Mariner:--
"Farewell, farewell, but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding Guest, He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man, and bird, and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things, both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all."
We love The Posie of Burns for its own sake, but we love it all the more, perhaps, because our attention was first directed to its sweet simplicity and tender beauty by one of our earliest and kindest friends, himself a poet of no mean order, the late Professor William Tennant, author of Anster Fair, in all its fantastical gaiety and homely mirth the most original poem, perhaps, to be found in the literature of our country.
A gentleman who resides at present in Cheltenham, a cadet of one of the oldest and most respectable families on the West Coast, and himself the head of a house not unknown in Highland story, has been so good as to send us a short Gaelic poem in manuscript, with a request that we should give an English version of it. With this request we very readily comply, such a task being to us a labour of love; the poem itself, besides, being very beautiful, and the history of its composition extremely interesting, as throwing some light on the manners and customs of the olden times. The following prefatory note from the MS. itself sufficiently explains the origin of this quaint and curious Hebridean Epithalamium:--"It was the custom in the West Highlands of Scotland in the olden time to meet the bride coming forth from her chamber with her maidens on the morning after her marriage, and to salute her with a poetical blessing called Beannachadh Bàird. On the occasion of the marriage of the Rev. Donald Macleod of Durinish, in the Isle of Skye, this practice having then got very much into desuetude, and none being found prepared to salute his bride agreeably to it, he himself came forward and received her with the following beautiful address." We present our readers with the original lines verbatim et literatim, precisely as they stand in the MS., only omitting two lines that are partly illegible from their falling into the sharp foldings of the sheet. The sense and tenor of these lines, however, we have ventured to guess at and to incorporate with our English version:--