"And raise," he cried, "the song of love, "When on this ring of ruby red Now, lightly poised, the rising oar Disperses wide the foamy spray, And, echoing far o'er Crinan's shore, Resounds the song of Colonsay. The lonely deck he paces o'er, Impatient for the rising day, And still, from Crinan's moonlight shore, He turns his eyes to Colonsay. The moonbeams crisp the curling surge, That sea-maid's form, of pearly light, Was whiter than the downy spray, And round her bosom, heaving bright, Her glossy, yellow ringlets play. Borne on a foamy-crested wave, She reach'd amain the bounding prow, Them clasping fast the chieftain brave, She, plunging, sought the deep below. Ah! long beside thy feigned bier, The monks the prayers of death shall say, And long, for thee, the fruitless tear Shall weep the Maid of Colonsay! But downwards, like a powerless corse, The murmurs sink, by slow degrees; No more the surges round him rave; Lull'd by the music of the seas, He lies within a coral cave. In dreamy mood reclines he long, Soft as that harp's unseen control, In morning dreams which lovers hear, Whose strains steal sweetly o'er the soul, But never reach the waking ear. JAMES MONTGOMERY. 1771-1854. JAMES MONTGOMERY's poems have | sion was committed to York Castle and fined; but he had the good sense to regard his persecution with moderation, and possibly gained more than he lost by it in the end. His first volume of poems, The Wanderer of Switzerland and other Poems, appeared in 1806. It reached a third edition in 1807, and then underwent the lash of the Edinburgh Review, with the usual result of increasing its circulation. He afterwards published The West Indies, in honour of the abolition of the slave trade, in 1807; Prison Amusements; The World before the Flood; Thoughts on Wheels, an attack on lotteries; and The Climbing Boy's Soliloquies, against employing boys to sweep chimneys by climbing up them. In 1819, he published Greenland, in five cantos; and in 1827, The Pelican Island. In 1825, he retired from the editorship of The Sheffield Iris, and in 1830-31 delivered a course of lectures on Poetry and General Literature at the Royal Institution. On the recommendation of Sir Robert Peel, he received a pension of £150 a-year, which he enjoyed till his death, which took place in 1854. no features that betray the land of his birth, and could hardly be expected to have; for though born a Scotchman, and bearing a Scotch name, his parents were Irish, and his upbringing English. When some friends expressed their surprise at his preserving no trace of his nationality, he replied by quoting Johnson's remark about catching a Scotchman when young. He was born on the 4th November 1771, at Irvine, in Ayrshire, where his father, John Montgomery, a Moravian missionary, was stationed for a short time. His parents went to the West Indies, and both died there his mother in Tobago, and his father in Barbadoes. Young Montgomery was educated at a Moravian school, at Fulneck, Yorkshire; and, being unwilling to qualify for the ministry, he was apprenticed to a grocer. In his sixteenth year he ran off from his first situation, and found another, which he left in turn for London, with the view of getting his poems published. Having failed in this, he returned to Yorkshire, and engaged as a clerk in a newspaper office in Sheffield, in 1791. After some time his employer failed, and, with the assistance of some friends, Montgomery established the Sheffield Iris, a weekly newspaper, at the head of which he remained till 1825. In the years 1794 and 1795, he was tried for political offences, and on each occa(12) | Montgomery's larger poems, though possessing descriptive beauties, are artificial and strain after effect, and are now seldom read. The greater part of his minor pieces, which are mostly religious, are commonplace; but a few have genuine poetic sentiments happily expressed. He is a sort of phenomenon in 2 Y poetic literature; for though he was in The rolling seasons, day and night, THE COMMON LOT. Once, in the flight of ages past, To him exist in vain. The clouds and sunbeams, o'er his eye No vestige where they flew. The annals of the human race, There lived a man :--and who was he? Of him afford no other trace Mortal! howe'er thy lot be cast, That man resembled thee. Unknown the region of his birth, The land in which he died unknown: His name has perish'd from the earth; This truth survives alone : That joy and grief, and hope and fear, Alternate triumph'd in his breast; His bliss and woe,-a smile, a tear!-Oblivion hides the rest. The bounding pulse, the languid limb, He suffer'd, but his pangs are o'er; more; And foes,-his foes are dead. He loved, but whom he loved, the grave He saw whatever thou hast seen; Than this, there lived a man! HOME. There is a land, of every land the pride, Beloved by heaven o'er all the world beside; Where brighter suns dispense serener And milder moons emparadise the night; The wealthiest isles, the most enchanting Views not a realm so bountiful and fair, For in this land of heaven's peculiar grace, While in his softened looks benignly The sire, the son, the husband, brother, friend; TANNAHILL, for delicacy and refine- | Paisley, in which town his father, ment of feeling and expression, comes James Tannahill, was a silk-gauze nearest to Burns of all our song-writers. His range was narrow, even compared with Hogg and Lady Nairne; for he had not the imagination of the one, nor the humour of the other; yet he possessed that sensitive tenderness of the poetic instinct, capable of touching the finest chords in nature to which the human' soul has ever responded, in a degree which Burns alone excelled. Like all their contemporaries, he was greatly Burns's inferior in passion, both as to range and intensity. weaver. His mother, Janet Pollock, the daughter of a small proprietor, or bonnet-laird, in Ayrshire, was a woman of superior talents and intelligence. Robert was born on the 3d June 1774, and was the fourth of six sons. His school education was limited to reading, writing, and arithmetic; and at an early age he was sent to learn weav ing, then a prosperous occupation, and the leading trade of Paisley. Tannahill gave early indications of a poetic temperament, accompanied with Robert Tannahill was a native of a taste for music, not always found to accompany the diviner art. To the lishers. His offer was declined, and early culture of his poetical and musi- the disappointment, added to a previous cal talents he added the cultivation of accession of bad health, had the most his mind by reading. In his twenty- depressing effect upon his spirits. In sixth year he had the misfortune to be the spring of 1810, the Ettrick Shepdisappointed in the only love affair in herd made a pilgrimage to Paisley, to which he was involved, and the effect visit him; and the two poets enjoyed a upon his shy and sensitive nature was night in each other's company. Tannato increase its native melancholy, which hill accompanied the Shepherd halfat last became so morbidly acute as to way to Glasgow on his return, and at be unbearable. About this time, and parting, with tears in his eyes, bade him possibly as a relief to his wounded farewell; observing that they would affections, he went, accompanied by his never meet again. Whether he then younger brother, to Lancashire, and re-contemplated the sad act which so soon mained two years in Bolton. They re- after closed his career, it were vain to turned on account of their father's ill-speculate; it is enough to know that on ness, and got home in time to obtain his dying blessing. His brother soon after this got married, and Robert alone was left with his mother, to whom he was tenderly attached; consequently he resolved to stay at home. Not long after his return to his loom and his song-writing in Paisley- he wrote little or nothing while in England he made the acquaintance of R. A. Smith, the musical composer, who was also a Paisley weaver, though born in Reading, Berkshire. The air to which Smith set "Jessie, the Flower of Dunblanc," first drew attention to his merits as a composer; and his fame has been linked with that of his friend and kindred companion ever since. In 1807, Tannahill published the first edition of his Poems and Songs, which met with a very successful reception from the public, and at once established his lyrical reputation. In 1809, he prepared a new and revised edition of his poems, which he offered to Constable & Co., the Edinburgh pub the 17th May 1810, he was found drowned, in a manner leaving no doubt about his having himself put an end to his existence. We have already remarked that his poetic range is a narrow one; out of it, he produced nothing of self-sustaining merit, and his poems which are not songs are very commonplace. As a specialist his fame is secure, and as living at the present day as when he first delighted his admiring countrymen. His songs, though true to universal nature, have certain local features which make their perfect enjoyment dependent on that sensitiveness to the influences of locality which characterises the Scotch mind, and in consequence he is not so highly appreciated anywhere as in Scotland, nor, in Scotland, anywhere as in Paisley, of which he is the poetic divinity. Here the centenary of his birth was celebrated in 1874 with great enthusiasm, on which occasion an elaborate edition of his works was issued by a Paisley publisher. |
