The echoes sleep on Cheviot's hills, When down their sides the crimson rills The hunts where gallant hearts were game, The raid that swooped with sword and flame, Give place to "law and order." Not while the rocking steeples reel God sets his poets singing; Or shrieks a cry of warning While fluttering round the beacon-light,But hear him greet the morning! The lark of Scotia's morning sky! Whose voice may sing his praises? Till through the cloud of fortune's wrong But left his land her sweetest song And earth her saddest story. 'Tis not the forts the builder piles That chain the earth together; The wedded crowns, the sister isles, The kindling thought, the throbbing words, Of mighty armies meeting. Thus while within the banquet glows, Their blended hues shall never fade Till War has hushed his cannon, Close-twined as ocean-currents braid The Thames, the Clyde, the Shannon! Each glistening eye and flushing cheek We come in one tumultuous tide, One surge of wild emotion, As crowding through the Frith of Clyde As when yon cloudless, quartered moon The swelling breasts of Ayr and Doon The century shrivels like a scroll, The past becomes the present, And face to face, and soul to soul, We greet the monarch-peasant. While Shenstone strained in feeble flights While Wolfe was climbing Abraham's heights Who heard the wailing infant's cry, - Whose passion-breathing voice ascends We love him, not for sweetest song, His wasteful self-surrender. 138 FOR THE BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. We praise him, not for gifts divine, His Muse was born of woman, His manhood breathes in every line, Was ever heart more human? We love him, praise him, just for this: In every form and feature, Through wealth and want, through woe and bliss, He saw his fellow-creature! No soul could sink beneath his love, Not even angel blasted; No mortal power could soar above Ay! Heaven had set one living man I fling my pebble on the cairn Of him, though dead, undying; |