ical and
poetical interpretation--a gift so peculiar that when she sang she
literally seemed inspired, taken possession of, by some other soul, that
entered into her as she opened her mouth and departed from her as she
shut it. She had a dull, brick-colored, long, thin face, and dull,
pale-green eyes, like boiled gooseberries; but when in a clear, high,
sweet, passionless soprano, like the voice of a spirit, and without any
accompaniment, she sang the old Scotch ballads which she had learned in
early girlhood from her nurse, she produced one of the most powerful
impressions that music and poetry combined can produce. From her I heard
and learned by ear "The Douglas Tragedy," "Fine Flowers in the Valley,"
"Edinbro'," and many others, and became completely enamored of the wild
beauty of the Scotch ballads, the terror and pity of their stories, and
the strange, sweet, mournful music to which they were told. I knew every
collection of them, that I could get hold of, by heart, from Scott's
"Border Minstrelsy" to Smith's six volumes of "National Scottish Songs
with their Musical Settings," and I said and sang them over in my lonely
walks perpetually; and they still are to me among the deepest and
freshest sources of poetical thought and feeling that I know. It is
impossible, I think, to find a truer expression of passion, anguish,
tenderness, and supernatural terror, than those poems contain. The dew
of heaven on the mountain fern is not more limpid than the simplicity of
their diction, nor the heart's blood of a lover more fervid than the
throbbing intensity of their passion. Misery, love, longing, and despair
have found no finer poetical utterance out of Shakespeare; and the
deepest chords of woe and tenderness have been touched by these often
unknown archaic song-writers, with a power and a pathos inferior only to
his. The older ballads, with the exquisite monotony of their burdens
soothing and relieving the tragic tenor of their stories, like the
sighing of wind or the murmuring of water; the clarion-hearted Jacobite
songs, with the fragrance of purple heather and white roses breathing
through their strains of loyal love and death-defying devotion; and the
lovely, pathetic, and bewitchingly humorous songs of Burns, with their
enchanting melodies, were all familiar to me, and, during the year that
I spent in Edinburgh, were my constant study and delight.

On one occasion I sat by Robert Chambers, and heard him relate some