A mellow voice Fitz-Eustace had,
The air he chose was wild and sad;
Such have I heard, in Scottish land,
Rise from the busy harvest band,
When falls before the mountaineer,
On lowland plains, the ripened ear.
Now one shrill voice the notes prolong,
Now a wild chorus swells the song:
Oft have I listened, and stood still,
As it came soften'd up the hill,
And deem'd it the lament of men
Who languish'd for their native glen;
And thought how sad would be such sound,
On Susquehannah's swampy ground,
_Kentucky's wood-encumber'd brake_,
Or wild Ontario's boundless lake,
Where heart-sick exiles, in the strain,
Recall'd fair Scotland's hills again!
After Sir Walter, the next English poet to tell the world of Kentucky
and one of her sons, was George Gordon (Lord) Byron. His references
are found in the eighth canto and the sixty-first to the sixty-seventh
stanzas inclusive, of _Don Juan_. This poem was begun in 1819 and
published, several cantos at a time, until the final sixteenth
appeared in 1824. The sixty-first stanza will serve our purpose.