Alas! indeed, For her you leave. Your brother’s grief To them will cleave. It was on Easter Monday’s feast The branch of peace Went down with you. It has been acknowledged even by Dr. Hyde, one of our greatest Irish authorities of the present, that the Scottish Gaels led the way in this great change that transformed the Celtic poetry of both Islands, and to Mary Macleod, popularly known as “Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruaidh,” has been assigned the honour of being the first of the modern Highland bards to inaugurate the new system. Before her day most of the Gaelic poetry was Ossianic, or of uncertain authorship; fugitive, and generally in the ancient style. The poets were bound by the rules of their order, and to excel within the very narrow limits of the old-world prosody, hedged about as it was with so many technicalities, required years of severe bardic study and preparation. Mary, apparently without any tuition, without even the power to read or write, suddenly burst these unnatural bonds asunder, and gave to the spirit of her poetry the freedom of the elements, unhampered and unfettered by the intricate metres of the Schools. She invented rhythms of her own, often making the music of sound an echo of the sense. And from her time scores of new and brilliant metres have made their appearance. Only a few biographical details of this remarkable woman are known, but they are characteristic, and extremely interesting, revealing a personality outside the common order of Highland intellect. Born in Roudal, Harris, in the year 1569, she was the daughter of Alexander Macleod, son of Alasdair Ruadh, a descendant of the chief of that distinguished clan; and at an early age, apparently, she became a nurse in the family of the Macleods at Dunvegan Castle. Though otherwise illiterate, the poetic Mary must have derived some culture, independently of book learning, from her association with the chiefs and their following in the ancestral home where, nearly 200 years afterwards, Dr. Johnson and his friend were so hospitably entertained. In the course of her long career, for she lived to be 105 years old, she nursed no less than five lairds of the Macleods,[32] and two of the lairds of Applecross. There is no evidence that she was much addicted to the making of poetry until somewhat advanced in life. It was then at least that she composed those pieces that have survived and made her name illustrious in Highland literature. Most of them have reference to events that happened in the Macleod family.