den
Was never none but she;
Well may such a lady
Goddes mother be.

You get the most emotional note of the Ballad in such a stanza
as this, from "The Nut-Brown Maid":--

Though it be sung of old and young
That I should be to blame,
Their's be the charge that speak so large
In hurting of my name;
For I will prove that faithful love
It is devoid of shame;
In your distress and heaviness
To part with you the same:
And sure all tho that do not so
True lovers are they none:
For, in my mind, of all mankind
I love but you alone.

All these notes, again, you will admit to be exquisite: but they gush
straight from the unsophisticated heart: they are nowise deep save in
innocent emotion: they are not _thoughtful_. So when Barbour breaks out
in praise of Freedom, he cries

A! Fredome is a noble thing!

And that is really as far as he gets. He goes on

Fredome mayse man to hafe liking.

(Freedom makes man to choose what he likes; that is, makes him free)

Fredome all solace to man giffis,
He livis at ese that frely livis!
A noble hart may haif nane ese,
Na ellys nocht that may him plese,
Gif fredome fail'th: for fre liking
Is yharnit ouer all othir thing...

--and so on for many lines; all saying the same thing, that man yearns
for Freedom and is glad when he gets it, because then he is free; all
hammering out the same observed fact, but all knocking vainly on the door
of thought, which never opens to explain what Freedom _is_.

Now let us take a leap as we did with prose, and 'taking off' from the
Nut-Brown Maid's artless confession,

in my mind, of all mankind
I love but you alone,

let us alight on a sonnet of Shakespeare's--

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts
Which I by lacking have supposed dead:
And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye
As interest of the dead!--which now appear
But things removed, that hidden in thee lie.
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
That due of many now is mine alone:
Their images I loved I view in thee,
And thou, all they