I see that a discussion has arisen in the _Spectator_ on the "Canadian
Boat Song." It appeared in _Blackwood's_ nearly a century ago, and
ever since its authorship has been the subject of recurrent
controversy. The author may have been "Christopher North," or his
brother, Tom Wilson, or Gait, or the Ettrick Shepherd, or the Earl of
Eglinton, or none of these. We shall never know. It is one of those
pleasant mysteries of the past, like the authorship of the Junius
Letters (if, indeed, that can be called a mystery), which can never be
exhausted because they can never be solved. I am not going to offer an
opinion; for I have none, and I refer to the subject only to illustrate
the magic of a word. The poem lives by virtue of the famous stanza:
From the lone shieling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas--
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland.
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
It would be an insensible heart that did not feel the surge of this
strong music. The yearning of the exile for the motherland has never
been uttered with more poignant beauty, though Stevenson came near the
same note of tender anguish in the lines written in far Samoa and
ending:
Be it granted me to behold you again, in dying.
Hills of home, and to hear again the call.
Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying--
And hear no more at all.
But for energy and masculine emotion the unknown author takes the palm.
The verse is like a great wave of the sea, rolling in to the mother
shore, gathering impetus and grandeur as it goes, culminating in the
note of vision and scattering itself triumphantly in the splendour of
that word "Hebrides."
It is a beautiful illustration of the magic of a word used in its
perfect setting. It gathers up the emotion of the theme into one chord
of fulfilment and flings open the casement of the mind to far horizons.
It is not the only instance in which the name has been used with
extraordinary effect. Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" has many
beautiful lines, but the peculiar glory of the poem dwells in the
couplet in which, searching for parallels for the song of the Highland
girl that fills "the vale profound," he hears in imagination the
cuckoo's call
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Wordsworth, like Homer and Milton, and all who touch the sublime in
poetry, had the power of transmuting a proper name to a strange and
significant beauty. The most memorable example, perhaps, is in the
closing lines of the poem to Dorothy Wordsworth:
But on old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
"Lapland" is an intrinsically beautiful word, but it is its setting in
this case that makes it shine, pure and austere, like a star in the
heavens of poetry. And the miraculous word need not be intrinsically
beautiful. Darien is not, yet it is that word in which perhaps the
greatest of all sonnets finds its breathless, astonished close:
Silent--upon a peak--in Dar--ien.
And the truth is that the magic of words is not in the words
themselves, but in the distinction, delicacy, surprise of their use.
Take the great line which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Antony--