With heigh and howe, and _rumbelowe_,
The young folks were full bauld.
There is an old English sea song of which the burden is "with a
rumbelowe." In one more modern, in Deuteromelia 1609, the word dance the
rumbelow is translated--
Shall we go dance to round, around,
Shall we go dance the round.
Greek--_Rhombos_, _Rhembo_, to spin or turn round.
The word is apparently another remnant of the old Druidical chants
sung by the priests when they walked in procession round their sacred
circles of Stonehenge and others, and clearly traceable to the
Gaelic--_Riomball_, a circle; _riomballach_, circuitous; _riomballachd_,
circularity.
The perversion of so many of these once sacred chants to the service of
the street ballad, suggests the trite remark of Hamlet to Horatio:--
To what base uses we may come at last!
. . . . . .
Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay,
May stop a hole to keep the winds away.
The hymns once sung by thousands of deep-voiced priests marching in
solemn procession from their mystic shrines to salute with music and
song, and reverential homage, the rising of the glorious orb which
cheers and fertilises the world, the gift as well as the emblem of
Almighty Power and Almighty Love, have wholly departed from the
recollection of man, and their poor and dishonoured relics are spoken of
by scholars and philosophers, as trash, gibberish, nonsense, and an idle
farrago of sounds, of no more philological value than the lowing of
cattle or the bleating of sheep. But I trust that all attentive readers
of the foregoing pages will look upon the old choruses--so sadly
perverted in the destructive progress of time, that demolishes languages
as well as empires and systems of religious belief--with something of
the respect due to their immense antiquity, and their once sacred
functions in a form of worship, which, whatever were its demerits as
compared with the purer religion that has taken its place, had at least
the merit of inculcating the most exalted ideas of the Power, the Love,
and the Wisdom of the Great Creator.