‘So please you,’ thus the youth rejoin’d, ‘Our choicest minstrel’s left behind. Ill may we hope to please your ear, Accustom’d Constant’s strains to hear.The harp full deftly can he strike, And wake the lover’s lute alike;To dear Saint Valentine, no thrush Sings livelier from a spring-tide bush, No nightingale her love-lorn tune More sweetly warbles to the moon.Woe to the cause, whate’er it be, Detains from us his melody, Lavish’d on rocks, and billows stern, Or duller monks of Lindisfarne.Now must I venture as I may, To sing his favourite roundelay.’
IX.
A mellow voice Fitz-Eustace had, The air he chose was wild and sad;Such have I heard, in Scottish land, Rise from the busy harvest band, When falls before the mountaineer, On Lowland plains, the ripen’d ear.Now one shrill voice the notes prolong, Now a wild chorus swells the song:Oft have I listen’d, and stood still, As it came soften’d up the hill, And deem’d it the lament of men Who languish’d for their native glen;And thought how sad would be such sound, On Susquehanna’s swampy ground, Kentucky’s wood-encumber’d brake, Or wild Ontario’s boundless lake, Where heart-sick exiles, in the strain, Recall’d fair Scotland’s hills again!
X.
Song
Where shall the lover rest, Whom the fates sever From his true maiden’s breast, Parted for ever?Where, through groves deep and high, Sounds the far billow, Where early violets die, Under the willow. CHORUS. Eleu loro, &c. Soft shall be his pillow. There, through the summer day, Cool streams are laving; There, while the tempests sway, Scarce are boughs waving; There, thy rest shalt thou take, Parted for ever, Never again to wake,
