Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 October 1879 — The Songs of Scotland. [ARTICLE]

The Songs of Scotland.

There is a very general impression, especially in England, that Burns created Scottish song, and that all that is valuable in it is his work. Instead of saying that Bums created Scottish song, it would be more true to say Scottish song created Burns, and that in him it culminated. He was born at a happy hour for a national songster, with a great background of song centuries old behind him, and breathing from hie childhood a very atmosphere of melody. From the earliest times the Scotch have been a song-loving people, meaning by song both the tunes, or airs, and words. This is not the side which the Scotchman turns to the world, when he goes abroad into it to push his fortune. We all know the character that passes current as that of the typical Scot—sandyhaired, hard-featured, clannish to his countrymen, shrewd, cautious, selfseeking, self-reliant, persevering, unsympathetic to strangers, difficult to drive a bargain with, impossible to circumvent. The last thing a stranger would credit him with would be the love of song. Yet when that hard, calculating trader has retired from the ’change or the market-place to his own fireside, perhaps the things he loves best, almost as much as his dividends, will be those simple national melodies he has known from his childhood. Till a very recent time the whole air of Scotland, among the country people, was redolent of song. You heard the milkmaid singing some old chant, as she milked the cows in field or byre; the housewife went about her work,* or span at her wheel, with a lilt upon her lips. In. the Highland glen you might hear some solitary reaper singing like her whom Wordsworth has immortalized; in the lowland harvest field, now one, now another, of the reapers taking up an oldworld melody, and then the whole band breaking out into some well-known chorus. The plowman, too, in winter, as he turned over the lea furrows, beguiled the time by humming or whistling a tune; even the weaver, as he clashed his shuttle between the threads, mellowed the harsh sound with a song. In former days song was the great amusement of the peasantry, as they of a winter night met for a hamlet-gather-ing by each other’s firesides. This was the usage in Scotland for centuries, and I am not sure that the radical newspaper which has superseded it is an improvement. — Atlantic.