Or of _Sir James the Rose_:

'O, hae ye nae heard o' Sir James the Rose,
The young laird o' Balleichan,
How he has slain a gallant squire
Whose friends are out to take him!'

Or in yet briefer space the whole materials of tragedy are given to us,
as in that widely-known and multiform legend of the _Twa Sisters_ which
Tennyson took as the basis of his _We were two daughters of one race_:

'He courted the eldest wi' glove and wi' ring,
Binnorie, O Binnorie!
But he loved the youngest aboon a' thing,
By the bonnie mill dams o' Binnorie.'

Sometimes a brilliant or glowing picture is called up before our eyes by
a stroke or two; as--

'The boy stared wild like a grey goshawk,'

or

'The mantle that fair Annie wore
It skinkled in the sun';

or

'And in at her bower window
The moon shone like a gleed';

or

'O'er his white banes when they are bare
The wind shall sigh for evermair.'

Or, to rise to the height of pity, despair, and terror to which the
ballad strains of Scotland have reached, what master of modern realism
has surpassed in trenchant and uncompromising power the passages in
_Clerk Saunders_?--

'Then he drew forth his bright long brand,
And slait it on the strae,
And through Clerk Saunders' body
He 's gart cauld iron gae';

and,

'She looked between her and the wa',
And dull and drumly were his een.'

Has it ever happened, since the harp of Orpheus drew iron tears down
Pluto's cheek, that ruth has taken so grim a form as that of _Edom o'
Gordon_, as he turned over with his spear the body of his victim?

'O gin her breast was white;
"I might have spared that bonnie face
To be some man's delight."'

Is there in the many pages of romance a climax so surprising, so
overwhelming--a revelation that in its succinct and despairing candour
goes so straight to the quick of human feeling--as that in the ballad of
_Gil Morice_?--

'"I ance was as fu' o' Gil Morice
As the hip is wi' the stane."'

To the fountainhead of our ballad-lore the great poets and romancists,
from Chaucer to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to Wordsworth and
Swinburne, and from Gavin Douglas to Burns and Scott and Stevenson, have
gone for refreshment and new inspiration, when the world was weary and
tame and sunk in the thraldom of the vulgar, the formal, and the
commonplace; and never