Glen Collection of printed music > Printed text > Harp of Renfrewshire

PREFACE
THE land of the mountain and tlie flood may be characterised
as emphatically the land of Poetry. If Scotland has pro-
duced no great dramatic poet like Shakspeare, no great epic poet
like Milton, she can boast of Scott, whose immortal verse has
made her scenery familiar to the inhabitants of the remotest
corners of civilization ; and of Burns, whose lyric pieces touch
the hearts of men with a power that no English poet- not even
Shakspeare or Milton — has rivalled. Scottish poetry has features
that are peculiarly its own. Its themes are the natural beauty
that surrounds the people, the occupations that make up the
routine of their daily life, the joys and sorrows that chequer
their experiences. The moral of all Scottish national poetry is,
that no country exists in the wide world with claims upon the
heart's affections equal to those of Caledonia. No land has sons
so brave and free, or daughters so fair and worthy of love.
Every true Scot is at heart a poet, and if he does not breathe in
numbers of his own, he can at least rehearse the strains of others.
Ballad and lyric poetry has a strong hold upon the Scottish
people, and has found many able expositors. Collectors and
commentators have brought skill and industry to bear upon their
work, and we are enriched by the fruits of their labour to an
extent unparalleled elsewhere. AUan Ramsay, Sir Walter Scott,
Motherwell, and a host of other patriotic minstrels, have not only
given to Scotland poems of their own that will never die ; they
also caught up from tattered manuscripts, and from old men's
memories, the ballads and songs of remote progenitors that tell us
how they thought, and lived, and laboured. We feel, as no pre-
ceding generation felt, how much we are indebted to these
workers in a field whose importance was not acknowledged in