Do not lift him from the bracken, leave him lying where he fell-- Better bier ye cannot fashion: none beseems him half so well As the bare and broken heather, and the hard and broken sod, Whence his angry soul ascended to the judgment-seat of God! Winding-sheet we cannot give him--seek no mantle for the dead, Save the cold and spotless covering showered from heaven upon his head. Leave his broadsword as we found it, rent and broken with the blow, That, before he died, avenged him on the foremost of the foe. Leave the blood upon the bosom--wash not off that sacred stain; Let it stiffen on the tartan, let his wounds unclosed remain, Till the day when he shall show them at the throne of God on high, When the murderer and the murdered meet before their Judge's eye. Nay--ye should not weep, my children! leave it to the faint and weak; Sobs are but a woman's weapons--tears befit a maiden's cheek. Weep not, children of Macdonald! weep not thou, his orphan heir; Not in shame, but stainless honor, lies thy slaughtered father there; Weep not--but when years are over, and thine arm is strong and sure, And thy foot is swift and steady on the mountain and the muir, Let thy heart be hard as iron, and thy wrath as fierce as fire, Till the hour when vengeance cometh for the race that slew thy sire! Till in deep and dark Glenlyon rise a louder shriek of woe, Than at midnight, from their eyry, scared the eagles of Glencoe; Louder than the screams that mingled with the howling of the blast, When the murderers' steel was clashing, and the fires were rising fast; When thy noble father bounded to the rescue of his men, And the slogan of our kindred pealed throughout the startled glen; When the herd of frantic women stumbled through the midnight snow, With their fathers' houses blazing, and their dearest dead below! Oh, the horror of the tempest, as the flashing drift was blown, Crimsoned with the conflagration, and the roofs went thundering down! Oh, the prayers, the prayers and curses, that together winged their flight From the maddened hearts of many, through that long and woful night!-- Till the fires began to dwindle, and the shots grew faint and few, And we heard the foeman's challenge only in a far halloo: Till the silence once more settled o'er the gorges of the glen, Broken only by the Cona plunging through its naked den. Slowly from the mountain summit was the drifting veil withdrawn, And the ghastly valley glimmered in the gray December dawn. Better had the morning never dawned upon our dark despair! Black amidst the common whiteness rose the spectral ruins there: But the sight of these was nothing more than wrings the wild dove's