And lo! the grey plumes covered them all,
      Shoulder and breast and brow. 
   I felt the wind of their whirling flight: 
   Was it sea or sky? was it day or night? 
      It is always night-time now.

   Dear, will you never relent, come back? 
      I loved you long and true. 
   O winged white wife, and our children three,
   Of the wild wind’s kin though you surely be,
      Are ye not of my kin too?

   Ay, ye once were mine, and, till I forget,
      Ye are mine forever and aye,
   Mine, wherever your wild wings go,
   While shrill winds whistle across the snow
      And the skies are blear and grey.

Some powerful and strong ballads follow, many of which, such as The Cruel Priest, Deid Folks’ Ferry, and Marchen, are in that curious combination of Scotch and Border dialect so much affected now by our modern poets.  Certainly dialect is dramatic.  It is a vivid method of re-creating a past that never existed.  It is something between ‘A Return to Nature’ and ‘A Return to the Glossary.’  It is so artificial that it is really naive.  From the point of view of mere music, much may be said for it.  Wonderful diminutives lend new notes of tenderness to the song.  There are possibilities of fresh rhymes, and in search for a fresh rhyme poets may be excused if they wander from the broad highroad of classical utterance into devious byways and less-trodden paths.  Sometimes one is tempted to look on dialect as expressing simply the pathos of provincialisms, but there is more in it than mere mispronunciations.  With the revival of an antique form, often comes the revival of an antique spirit.  Through limitations that are sometimes uncouth, and always narrow, comes Tragedy herself; and though she may stammer in her utterance, and deck herself in cast-off weeds and trammelling raiment, still we must hold ourselves in readiness to accept her, so rare are her visits to us now, so rare her presence in an age that demands a happy ending from every play, and that sees in the theatre merely a source of amusement.  The form, too, of the ballad—­how perfect it is in its dramatic unity!  It is so perfect that we must forgive it its dialect, if it happens to speak in that strange tongue.

   Then by cam’ the bride’s company
      Wi’ torches burning bright. 
   ‘Tak’ up, tak’ up your bonny bride
      A’ in the mirk midnight!’

   Oh, wan, wan was the bridegroom’s face
      And wan, wan was the bride,
   But clay-cauld was the young mess-priest
      That stood them twa beside!

   Says, ’Rax me out your hand, Sir Knight,
      And wed her wi’ this ring’;
   And the deid bride’s hand it was as cauld
      As ony earthly thing.

   The priest he touched that lady’s hand,
      And never a word he said;
   The priest he touched that lady’s hand,
      And his ain was wet and red.