Scottish Ballads — Page 191
It was no easy matter to choose a group of representative ballads from among so many almost equally fine and equally damaged with thin places. Finally, it seemed best to take, from among the finest, those that had passages of genius—a line here and there of surpassing imagination and poetry—rare in even the best folk-songs. Such passages do not occur but in ballads that are throughout on the level of the highest of their kind. ‘None but my foe to be my guide’ so distinguishes Helen of Kirconnell; the exquisite stanza about the hats of birk, The Wife of Usher’s Well; its varied refrain, The Dowie Dens of Yarrow; the stanza spoken by Margaret asking for room in the grave, Sweet William and Margaret; and a number of passages, Sir Patrick Spens, such as that beginning, ‘I saw the new moon late yestreen,’ the stanza beginning ‘O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords,’ and almost all the stanzas following. A Lyke Wake Dirge is of surpassing quality throughout. I am sorry to have no room for Jamieson’s version of Fair Annie, for Edom o’ Gordon, for The Dæmon Lover, for Edward, Edward, and for the Scottish edition of The Battle of Otterbourne.