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Untitled Article
ea * e and plenty for the naked rocks and sterile valleys of Badenoch , where , at the close of a life of toil and hardship , he might lay his head in his mother ' s grave . He who writes once travelled a road in Perthshi / e , in company with an old , ignorant , very ignorant man , a common beggar . Unused to sympathy ,
when he found himself sympathised with , his heart was opened , and he told something of his past life . From his earliest years be had been an outcast , one of that class who form the hewers of wood and drawers of water , in our great manufacturing towns . Instruction of any sort , save in evil-doing , he had never received , he was one of those who are kept in ignorance and crushed and driven into vice , and then punished for that very ignorance and vice . At the commencement of the war he enlisted for a
soldier , and was ultimately sent to Portugal . His comrade happened to be a Scotsman who was well acquainted with the poetical literature of his country , and this poor and ignorant soldier felt all that was good in him so attracted by the sound and the sentiment when he could understand it of these songs , that he learned many of them by heart . Much evil he saw and committed , and much hardship , heart-hardening and grievous
hardship , did he endure in the course of that long and bloody war ; but at length it approached its close and the British Army was advancing on France . One day while encamped , this soldier in strolling in the neighbourhood of the camp , came suddenly on a email house embosomed among trees . It happened to be tenanted solely by a woman , and thoughts of hell , of such scenes as make the heart shudder , and the hand
clench , and the lips curse , even in the name of God , war and warriors , came thronging into this ignorant and debased man ' s mind ; but even in that hour of projected sin , a remembrance came faintly at first , but gradually stronger and stronger of the scenes , the peace and the innocence , described in the songs he had learned , and the beauty and manliness and goodness pictured in them , seemed , in his own words , to take a divine shape and lead him away from iniquity . And that old and miserable
man wept while he remembered how Scotland ' s songs had been instrumental in keeping a damning stain from his darkened but still immortal soul . The old belief that guardian spirits ever hovered round the paths of men , covered with the mifty mantle of superstition a mighty truth , for every beautiful and pure and good thought which the heart holds , ia an angel of mercy , purifying and guarding the soul .
If it be asked why the Songs of Scotland are thus more beautiful than those of other lands , and why they carry with them a greater influence ? the answer is easy . Those who wrote them , were not writing for a caste , but for a people—• they were addressing themselves to a universal mind—they were throwing the robe of poetry over joys and sorrows whicn they had themselves shared—they were addressing a whole
Untitled Article
* Off The Songs qf Scotland .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1836, page 208, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2656/page/14/
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