276 " AULD ROBIN GRAY " 



crowns and purple, and, arrayed meanly, steal forth 

 to meet again in some desert place on the remote 

 borders of their respective kingdoms, to be to each 

 other as in the ancient days when they played to- 

 gether in the sun, and slept twined in one another's 

 arms in a cave, on a bed of dry leaves. 



It is in the folk-songs and early ballads, of which 

 the tunes as well as words have survived, that we 

 find this union of music and poetry. That period 

 passed away before the ages of a higher culture and 

 of the "perfect lyric," the witty, polished, intensely 

 artificial poetry in which the simple natural emo- 

 tions, common to all humanity, had little or no 

 part. In the eighteenth century the Scotch peasant 

 poet of genius brought us back to nature and passion 

 in his songs in which his words were fitted to the old 

 surviving melodies he found. Others followed, and 

 perhaps the most perfect example of that or any 

 time in our history of the union of words and music 

 is found in the ballad of Auld Robin Gray. At all 

 events, we feel that after a century and a half it has 

 not yet lost its virtue. 



The reason of this vitality is not merely that the 

 story has a universal appeal — a thousand as good 

 have been told in verse — but mainly because the 

 words and the tune are so admirably fitted. All the 

 emotions described — the love, the weary waiting, 

 the abandonment of hope, the enduring grief and sad 

 resignation — are jointly and equally expressed by 

 both : they are described in the words and echoed in 

 the tune with its wailing notes which simulate the 



