As I was walking all alone I heard twa corbies making a moan. The one unto the other did say: Where shall we gang and dine to-day? In beyond that old turf dyke I wot there lies a new-slain knight, And naebody kens that he lies there, But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair. His hound is to the hunting gone, His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame, His lady’s ta’en anither mate-- Sae we may make our dinner sweet. You’ll sit upon his white neck-bone And I’ll pick out his bonny blue een; With a lock of his golden hair We’ll thatch our nest when it grows bare. Many a one for him makes moan, But none sall ken where he is gone; O’er his white bones when they grow bare The wind shall blow forever mair. Observe, the wind simply blows. That is enough; but a modern poet would have sought to intensify by making the wind moan, or shriek, or sob, or something of the kind. Mr. Lowell here quoted a ballad which tells a story of a child-murder. It begins: Fair Anne sate in her bower Down by the greenwood side, And the flowers did spring, And the birds did sing, ’Twas the pleasant Mayday tide. The ballad singers had all the advantage of that spur of the moment which the excitement of speaking gives, and they also received the magnetism which came from the sympathy of their hearers. They knew what _told_, for they had their hand upon the living pulse of feeling. There was no time to palaver; they must come to the point. The Percy came out of Northumberland, And a vow to God made he That he would hunt in the mountains Of Cheviot within days three, In the maugre of Doughty Douglas And all that ever with him be. They plunge into deep water at once. And there is never any filling up. The transitions are abrupt. You can no more foretell the swift wheel of the feeling than that of a falcon, and the phrases flash forth sharp-edged and deadly like a sword drawn in wrath. The passions speak out savagely and without any delicacies of circumlocution. It is worth thinking of whether the press, which we have a habit of calling such a fine institution, be not weakening the fibre and damaging the sincerity of our English and our thinking, quite as fast as it diffuses intelligence.