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The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern...
The Songs of Scotland Ancient and Modern Author:Allan Cunningham Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ALEXANDER SCOTT. Gay, and light, and elegant beyond most poets of his time, Alexander Scott sang with much more sweetness than strength, and was more anxious ... more »after the smoothness of his numbers than the natural beauty of his sentiments : he flows smooth, but he seldom flows deep; he is refined and delicate, but has little vigour and no passion. Yet his verses are exceedingly pleasing—they are melodious, with meaning in their melody, and possess in no small degree that easy and gliding-away grace of expression, of which the old minstrel vaunted:— Forbye how sweet my numbers flow, And slide away like water! In acknowledging the skill of Scott in lyric composition, and uniting with my friend David Laing in admiring the ease and happiness of his versification, I cannot be insensible that his songs, with all their elegance, have little of the romantic ardour of exalted love, or present, amid their grace and fluency, any very original or moving pictures of domestic life or enthusiastic attachment. The songs of James the Fifth and his subject, Scott, are as different in their nature as their reception has been with the world. The former, full of visible life and jollity and enjoyment, with life's-blood in them for a thousand years, have descended to us without anyloss of their original brightness, and still rival the works of more admired poets. The latter have already become half obsolete—are faded and gone, like the green huntresses in an ancient tapestry: they speak a language to which few hearts respond, and are consigned, in spite of all their polish and their melody, to the place over which oblivion reigns. It requires no divination to find out the cause of this: it is the triumph of vigorous nature over the polished dexterity of art—the upshot of that contest which somet...« less