But through all the changes and distractions of the three centuries since the Warden's men met with merriment and parted with blows at the Reidswire, the old ballad music--the voice of the blood; the very speech and message of the hills and streams--has sounded like a softly-played accompaniment to the strenuous labour of the race with hand and head--a reminder of the men and the thoughts of 'the days of other years.' At times, in the strife of Church or State, or in the chase of gain, the magic notes of this 'Harp of the North' may have sunk low, may have become nigh inaudible. But in the pauses when the nation could listen to the rhythmic beat of its own heart, the sound has made itself heard and felt like the noise of many waters or the sough of the wind in the tree-tops; it is music that can never die out of the land. Its echo has never been wholly missed by Dee and Earn and Girvan; certainly never by Yarrow and Teviot and Tweed. The 'Spiritual Songs'--the 'Gude and Godlie Ballates'--are lost, or are remembered only by the antiquary; not indeed because they were spiritual, or because they were written by worthy men with good intent--for the Scottish Psalms, sung to their traditional melodies, touch a still deeper chord in the natural breast than the ballads--but because they lacked the sap of life, the beauty and the passion of nature's own teaching, which only can give immortality to song. There is a 'Harp of the Covenant', and in it there are piercing wails wrung from a people almost driven frantic with suffering and oppression. But the popular lays of the civil wars and commotions of the seventeenth century are few in number, and singularly wanting in those touches of grace and tenderness and kindly humour that somehow accompany the very roughest and most trenchant of the earlier ballads, like the bloom and fragrance that adorn the bristling thickets of the native whin on the slopes of the Eildons or Arthur Seat. The times were harsh and crabbed, and the song they yielded was like unto themselves. There are ballads of the _Battle of Pentland_, of _Bothwell Brig_, of _Killiecrankie_, and, to make a leap into another century, of _Sheriffmuir_. But they are memorable for the passion of hatred and scorn that is in them, rather than for their merits as poetry--for girdings, from one side or the other, at 'cruel Claver'se' and the red-shanked Highlandmen that slew the hope of the Covenant, or at the 'Riven hose and ragged hools, Sour milk and girnin' gools, Psalm beuks and cutty stools' of Whiggery.