Ye lovely maids, pitch high your notes As virgin voice can sound them, Sing of your brave, your noble Scots, For glory blazes round them. Small is the remnant you will see, Lamented be the others, But such a stem of such a tree Take to your arms like brothers. Then raise the pibroch, Donald Bane, Let the chanter yell, and the drone-notes swell, What storm can rend your mountain-rock, Split by the wind and weather, Than foeman's eye the bonnet blue Behind the nodding feather. O raise the pibroch, Donald Bane! Our caps to the sky we'll send them. Scotland, thy honours who can stain, Thy laurels who dare rend them! HIGHLAND TAY WAS written on leaving one of the loveliest scenes in Athol, if not in the world, and one of the sweetest maidens; therefore the song is truly no fiction. It was so true, that a beloved female friend of mine could never endure to hear it sung. It was never published, that I remember of.-It is to the air of "The Maid of Isla." WEAR away, ye hues of spring, Dear to me the day, the hour, When last her winding wave I saw, But dearer still the bonny bower That lies aneath yon birken shaw. Aye we sat, and aye we sigh'd, For there was ane my arm within; Aye the restless stream we eyed, And heard its soft and soothing din. The sun had sought Glen-Lyon's glade, Forth peer'd the e'ening's modest gem, An' every little cloud that stray'd, Look'd gaudy in its gouden hem, The playful breeze across the plain An' play'd along the mellow grain I saw the drops of dew so clear That trembled in a lovely eye, When lovers meet, 'tis to the mind The spring-flush o' the blooming year; But O their parting leaves behind Something to memory ever dear! |