Books and other items printed in Gaelic from 1871 to 1900 > Gaelic bards, and original poems

THE HAUNTED WATER OF DUBH-THALAMH. 245
prevalent among them. I don’t know whether this
proceeds from a fear of offending the supernatural beings
—with regard to whose existence there is indeed very
little scepticism—or whether it proceeds from a notion of
their unfitness for the purposes of poetry. But the fact
is as I have stated. The ballad which is now given, is
therefore, not to be regarded as, in its present form, a
popular Highland song. The story on which it is found¬
ed is certainly popular enough in one district of the
Highlands at any rate; but I am not aware that the
legend is known in other parts of the country. The
poem differs little from it in its incidents, though it aims
at giving something of a moral tone to the legend, by
bringing it as near as possible—in the midst of solitude,
uncertainty, and danger—to a remorseful reflection,
through means of a troubled dream, of a thoughtless and
perhaps evil life. The story I have often heard. Once,
especially, I recollect hearing it, on a stormy spring day,
in a little barn, where three men were working not far
from a roadside, and within three or four hundred yards
of the place where the incident was said to have happened.
After a few remarks, in a rustic Highland fashion, on
the things of heaven and earth that are undreamed of by
philosophy, this tale, in corroboration of something or
other that occurred in the course of conversation, was
told in a grave and earnest manner by one of the
workers, and listened to most respectfully by the others.
The narrator used, in a fine Celtic dialect, almost the
equivalent of the following :—
Heavy and slow came the waves of the night,
With a threat’ning lurch and a reel,
Ere they break with a shock on the spray-spatter’d rock,
Like blows on a warrior’s steel.
And a dreary moan from the mountains comes down
When the roar of the surge is laid;