Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/91

 9* s. xu. A, urn] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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presents it, Burns felt its charm, and, writing to his friend George Thomson, said he con- sidered it ''inexpressibly beautiful, and quite, as far as I know, original." He had often, he continued, tried to add a stanza to make the lyric long enough for a song, but in vain. "After balancing myself," he says, "for a musing five minutes, on the hind-legs of my elbow-chair, I produced the following :

were my love yon lilac fair, Wi' purple blossoms to the spring ;

And I a bird to shelter there, When wearied on my little wing ;

How I wad mourn when it was torn By Autumn wild and Winter rude

But I wad sing on wanton wing

When youthfu' May its bloom renew'd.

These verses," Burns continues, "are very far inferior to the foregoing, I frankly confess ; but if worthy insertion at all, they might be first in place, as every poet, who knows any- thing of his trade, will husband his best thoughts for a concluding stroke." Acting on Burns's suggestion, Thomson inserted in his ' Select Collection of Scottish Airs,' iv. 154, a song entitled " O were my Love yon Lilac fair," using Burns's eight lines as his first stanza, and Herd's two stanzas, arranged into one, as a third, placing between them the following by J. Richardson :

were my love yon vi'let sweet,

That peeps frae neath the hawthorn spray ; And I mysel the zephyr's breath, Amang its bonnie leaves to play ;

1 'd fan it wi' a constant gale Beneath the noontide's scorching ray :

And sprinkle it wi' freshest dews At morning dawn and parting day.

As Thomson carefully assigns to each contri- butor his respective share in the production, and adds in italics " The last stanza is old," there should never have been any possibility of crediting Burns with the anonymous lyric of Herd's anthology.

The simile of the " red rose," however, is splendidly appropriated by Burns in the song which begins :

My Luve is like a red, red rose,

That 's newly sprung in June ; My Luve is like the melodic,

That's sweetly play'd in tune.

With reference to this exquisitely tender anc haunting love song, which was admired anc worthily estimated by Hazlitt, Messrs Henley and Henderson, in their edition of tht poet's works, are at the trouble to observ* that it is " an arrangement, first and last, o fancies and expressions current in popula song long before Burns wrote." Lockhar anticipated this criticism when, in a note t( Scott's ' Border Minstrelsy,' iii. 314, he wrote

ee ' The Greek Anthology,' passim." In pro- claiming the results of their learning the ater editors appear to think themselves n a position to discredit the poet's achieve- ment. The argument, however, should go xactly the other way. Love is as old as the vorld, and lyric poets from time immemorial lave been laboriously endeavouring to con- secrate the passion in befitting verse. There s therefore little wonder that the "fancies and expressions " had been pretty well used up before it came to Burns's turn to handle original, and absolutely supreme treatment Dlaces him apart and alone. He comes into leliberate competition with the poets who lave utilized the "red rose" figure, and, ike his own victorious toper, he is king among them all. THOMAS BAYNE.
 * For the originals of all these lover's wishes,
 * he inspiring theme. His fresh, essentially

' BEOWULF.'

I HAVE lately had occasion to refer to the ranslations of the Anglo Saxon poem of 'Beowulf,' and a great trouble it has been. None of the numerous editions give a general index. Thomas Thorpe (1855) has a contents, or gives the story in his introduction, but it is insufficiently paged ; and he supplies five separate indexes, but none of them show me the pages which I require, namely, all the references to swimming. In the glossary, p. 296, he indexes "swymman" with two references, whereas at p. 295 under "sund" he gives eight.

The passage I am more particularly con- cerned with begins :

Art thou that Beowulf who strove with Breca on the broad sea in swimming match, when ye two for pride the billows tried and for vain boasting in the deep water risked your lives ? *

But now I want to compare Thorpe's trans-

allow the printer to hyphen swimming-match, thus very much weakening the words and putting out the metre : for the result of the hyphen is to make the word one, swimmingmatch, the hyphen being a device to show in the origin of the language they were two words. I would caution authors to set their faces resolutely against this hyphening system, which, like everything the English take up, is now monstrously over done. The way in which the printers have been allowed to hyphen mechanically words in this poem is to me most annoying ; soon we shall not be allowed a single sentence without hyphens. It springs, I presume, from some of the printer's rules for hyphening mechanically. Anglo Saxon is made trumpery by being hyphened ; if it requires a hyphen (but it does not) it should be written as the hyphen requires it to be pronounced, Anglosaxon.
 * Most of the editions subsequent to Arnold