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Thistle. 
Far dearer to me are the hills of the North, 
The land of blue mountains, the birthplace of worth; 
Those mountains where Freedom has fixed her abode, 
Those wide-spreading glens where no slave ever trode, 
Where blooms the red heather and thistle so green. 
“ Though rich be the soil where blossoms the rose, 
And barren the mountains and covered with snows 
Where blooms the red heather and thistle so green; 
Yet for friendship sincere, and for loyalty true, 
And for courage so bold which no foe could subdue, 
Unmatched is our country, unrivail’d our swains, 
And lovely and true are the nymphs on our plains, 
Where rises the thistle, the thistle so green. 
“ Far-famed are our sires in the battles of yore, 
And many the caimies that rise on our shore 
O’er the foes of the land of the thistle so green; 
And many a caimie shall rise on our strand, 
Should the torrent of war ever burst on our land. 
Let foe come on foe, as wave comes on wave, 
We ’ll give them a welcome, we ’ll give them a grave 
Beneath the red heather and thistle so green. 
“Oh, dear to our souls as the blessings of Heaven 
Is the freedom we boast, is the land that we live in. 
The land of red heather, and thistle so green; 
For that land and that freedom our fathers have bled, 
And we swear by the blood that our fathers have shed, 
No foot of a foe shall e’er tread on their grave; 
But the thistle shall bloom on the bed of the brave, 
The thistle of Scotland, the thistle so green.” 
There appears to be no proof of this sturdy flower having 
been adopted as the symbol of Scotland earlier than the middle 
of the fifteenth century, when a puritanic council held a solemn 
consultation within the walls of the old Council-house at Edin¬ 
burgh as to the advisability of erasing the papistic figure of St. 
Giles—which for so many centuries had been triumphantly 
borne through the battle and the breeze—from the old standard: 
religious animosity gained the day, and the time-honoured 
figure of the saint was replaced by the melancholy thistle. 
Old Culpepper indulges in some of his usual quaint and 
querulous humbug over this particular member of the thistle 
family. “It is,” he says, “under Capricorn, and therefore under 
both Saturn and Mars: one rids melancholy by sympathy, the 
other by antipathy. Their virtues are but few, but those are 
not to be despised; for the decoction of the thistle in wine being 
drank, expels superfluous melancholy out of the body, and 
