Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Scotland: Vols. VI–VIII. 1876–79.
A Wraith in the Scottish Highlands
By Henry Morford (18231881)U
And down to the South by the Great Mid-Glen,—
The lake-linked canal of Caledonia,
Historic track of her hero men;
By Garry’s flow and Tummel’s side;
By haunted Urrard and Killiecrankie,
Where Cavalier Claverhouse won and died;—
Where a princely fugitive hidden lay;
’Mong the heather-bells of the Moor of Drummossie,
That saw red Culloden’s fatal day;
Ever singing requiems in its flow;
By the lordly ruins of Invergarry,
That Duke William only half laid low;
That is ever bright with Montrose’s name,
And through dark Glencoe, forever recalling
The deadly assassin’s sword and flame,—
Or sailed, or ran, or paused, or rode,
As if some old dim and haunting Presence
Had been by my Highland blood bestowed?
That I half believed she had grown to two,—
My winsome, brown-eyed Starlight lassie,
With her tartan-plaid and her bonnet blue.
Too classic the shape, the form too tall.
No; something of old it was, half godlike,
Like some Paladin dimmed by his coming fall.
Not as he landed on Moidart’s shore,
With the memory of exiled years behind him,
And the hope of a kingdom on before;
Sheltered him far away in Skye;
Rough-garbed, as when over moor and mountain
He was forced alternate to hide and fly.
The Chevalier, with his winsome smile,
And the hope of a noble and kingly future,
Though danger and want might exist the while.
And unbonneted stood to the princely wraith,—
“What is it that holds, through so many ages,
A loyalty useless, a hollow faith?”
The smile to win, with no hand to hold;
The might have been, waking endless pity:
Given these, and the wondrous secret is told.
Go those away who have touched the heart:
They win what success could never win them,
They hold what could never be held by art.
Lady Jane, who died for an unsought crown;
The Orleans Maid, falling, madly heroic;
The Scottish Queen by her foes crushed down,—
Their stories linger when brighter fade;
And on every spot where they lived and suffered
There walks, through all coming time, a shade.”
That you missed of a crown of gold and gems;
But blest, among men, to wear forever
The proudest of mental diadems!—
To be ever gallant and fresh and young;
To keep, through the ages, a living presence,
With a song and a sigh on every tongue!