On the occasion of the funeral service of King Edward VII, William
Maxwell, in the _Record and Mail_, of Glasgow, writes as follows
concerning the pipes and song:
No music can express the abandonment of grief like the pipes,
for none is so individual. Its notes are the tradition of
centuries of wild freedom, and are bound by no ordinary system.
No music is so personal, for the pipes are the retainers of the
clans.
They, too, wear the tartan, and voice the feelings of their
clan--its joy and grief, its triumph and despair; and none
is more national, for it embodies the soul of a people, its
strength and its passions.
They are famous ballads to which the music of sorrow has been
wedded. For there are two national ballads known as “The Flowers
of the Forest,” and both are written by women. The first version
was written by Jane Elliot, of Minto, and bewails at Flodden
Field--
I’ve heard the lilting at our ewe milking,
Lasses a-lilting before the dawn of day;
But now they are moaning on ilka green loaning,
The flowers of the forest are a’ wede away.
The second song was written on the same subject by Alicia
Rutherford, of Fernilie, afterward known as Mrs. Patrick
Cockburn, and is generally regarded as the more effective in
singing, if not in composition.
I’ve seen the forest, adorned the foremost,
With flowers of the fairest, most pleasant and gay;
Sae bonny was their blooming,
Their scents the air perfuming,
But now they are withered, and weeded away.
Oh, fickle fortune, why this cruel sporting?
Oh, why still perplex us, poor sons of a day?
Nae mair your smiles can cheer me,
Nae mair your frowns can fear me,
For the flowers of the forest are a’ wede away.
The words are beautiful, and instinct with sorrow when spoken
or sung. But it is the music of the pipes that gives them
supreme interpretation, and makes them the expression of grief
so profound that “The Flowers of the Forest” has become the
national dirge. Nor is sorrow their only note.
The pipes can sound--and have sounded on many a stricken field
and in many an hour of despair--the triumph of hope and of
victory over death. They have stirred the blood and cleared
the head, and given strength to the arm of many a soldier who
has never dreamed of the eagle plume blended with the heather
and never heard through the mists of memory the clash of the
broadsword on the targe--
I hear the pibroch sounding
Deep o’er the mountain glen,
While light springing footsteps are trampling the heath--
’Tis the march of the Cameron men.
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