For a maid again I shall never be. Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blow, And blow the green leefs off the tree; O gentle Death, when wilt thou come, For of my life I am wearie. As in all single hearts and primitive natures, the visible features of death, the white shroud and the grave, "hap'd with the sods sae green," make a deep impression, and the imagination concerning the loved one lost is not lifted to spiritual forms, but dwells upon the painful figures of the charnel house. The ghosts that visit the living have the fatal breath of decaying mortality, and are summoned back by the cock to the winding sheet and the worm. The ballads that deal with this subject are all in the same strain, and repeat the same phrases. The lady asks her dead lover if there is any room at his head or any room at his feet in his new bed, and he answers that there is none, it is made so narrow, and that the worms are his only bedfellows; and warns her that he cannot give the kiss she craves, for his breath would be fatal. Sometimes the images of mortality are extremely powerful as well as grotesque, as in the ballad of Sweet William's Ghost:-- My meikle toe is my gavil post, My nose is my roof tree, My ribs are kebars to my house; There is no room for thee. Sometimes they have a touch of homely pathos, which relieves them from the conventional note of sorrow, as when the three sons of The Wife of Usher's Well are called back to the grave by the crowing cock, and the youngest says:-- Fare ye weel, my mother, dear; Farewell to barn and byre, And fare ye weel, the bonny lass, That kindles my mother's fire. One of the most interesting specimens of the ballads of this kind, as they exist to-day, borrowed in a modified form from the ancient, but embodying a still popular superstition, is The Unquiet Grave, recently taken down from the lips of a young girl in Sussex. It is founded on the belief, common to many primitive peoples, that excessive weeping disturbs the repose of the departed, and has a touch of that natural originality of description and that abruptness which presupposes a quickness of appreciation, which does not require an elaborate story to make the connection intelligible, characteristic of popular poetry, and which shows that the elements of mind to which it is addressed are always the same:-- The wind doth blow to-day, my love, And a few small drops of rain. I never had but one true love-- In the cold grave she was lain. I 'll do as much for my true love As any young man may, I 'll sit and mourn all at her grave For a twelvemonth and a day. The twelvemonth and a day being up, The dead began to speak: "O, who sits weeping on my grave And will not let me sleep?" "'T is I, my love, sits on your grave