It has been necessary, in considering
traditional songs of evidently mingled authorship, to reject some
one invaluable stanza or burden--the original and ancient surviving
matter of a spoilt song--because it was necessary to reject the
sequel that has cumbered it since some sentimentalist took it for
his own. An example, which makes the heart ache, is that burden of
keen and remote poetry:
"O the broom, the bonnie, bonnie broom,
The broom of Cowdenknowes!"
Perhaps some hand will gather all such precious fragments as these
together one day, freed from what is alien in the work of the
restorer. It is inexplicable that a generation resolved to forbid
the restoration of ancient buildings should approve the eighteenth
century restoration of ancient poems; nay, the architectural
"restorer" is immeasurably the more respectful. In order to give
us again the ancient fragments, it is happily not necessary to
break up the composite songs which, since the time of Burns, have
gained a national love. Let them be, but let the old verses be
also; and let them have, for those who desire it, the solitariness
of their state of ruin. Even in the cases--and they are not few--
where Burns is proved to have given beauty and music to the ancient
fragment itself, his work upon the old stanza is immeasurably finer
than his work in his own new stanzas following, and it would be
less than impiety to part the two.
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