Glen Collection of printed music > Printed music > British minstrel, and musical and literary miscellany

M0SrCAL AND IJIEIIARY M[SCELLANY.
BEAUTEOUS EYES DISCOVER.
317
KOUND FOK THREE VOICES.
Beau-te - ous
rf— q:
-f-
1
You'll ne - ver
■:iz
— I — -j-f
i-^
:i==fc:
eyes
dis
-O-
cov - er,
"W'hy so 'much cru - el - ty.
q=::]:
!~zi=
tind a
lo - ver.
Not one that
loves like me.
zzizzz
T=3:
iizjti-f-
3=:*=^:
^^
ttzt
5=ni
No,
no, ne - vcr
one tliJit
loves like me.
POWER OF MUSIC.
During the expedition to Buenos Ayres, a High-
land soldier while a prisoner in the hands of the
Spaniards, having formed an attachment to a
woman of the country, and charmed by the easy
life which the tropical fertility of the soil enabled
them to lead, had resolved to remain and settle in
South America. When he imparted this resolution
to his comrade, the latter did not argue with him,
but leading him to his tent, he placed him by his
side and sung him ' Lochaber no more.' The spell
was on him. The tears came into his eyes, and
wrapping his plaid around him, he murmured,
'Lochaber nae mair! — I maun gang back — Na!'
The songs of his childhood were ringing in his ears,
and he left that land of ease and plenty for the naked
rocks and sterile valleys of Badenoch, where at the
close of a life of toil and hardship, he might lay his
head in his mother's grave. He who writes once
travelled a road in Perthshire, in company with an
old, ignorant,very ignorant man,acommon beggar.
Unused to sympathy, when he found himself sympa-
thised with, his heart was opened, and he told
something of his past life. From his earliest years
he had been an outcast, one of that class who form
the hewers of wood and drawers of water in our
great manufacturing towns. Instruction of any
sort, save in evil-doing, he had never received ; he
was one of those svho are kept in ignorance and
crushed and driven into vice, and then punished for
that very ignorance and vice. At the commence-
ment of the war he enlisted for a soldier, and was
ultimately sent to Portugal. His comrade hap-
pened to be a Scotchman, who was well acquainted
with the poetical literature of his country, and this
poor and ignorant soldier felt all that was good in
him so attracted by the sound and sentiment, when
he could understand it, of these songs, that he
learned many of them by heart. Much evil he saw
and committed, and much hardship, heart-harden-
ing and grievous hardship, did he endure in the
course of that long and bloody war; but at length
it approached its close, and the British army was
advancing on France. One day while encamped,
No. 77.
this soldier, in strolling in the neighbourhood of the
camp, came suddenly on a small house embosomed
among trees. It happened to be tenanted solely by
a woman, and thoughts of hell, of such scenes as
make the heart shudder, and the hand clench, and
the lips curse, even in the name of God, war and
warriors, came thronging into this ignorant and
debased man's mind ; but even in that hour of pro-
jected sin, a remembrance came faintly at first, but
gradually stronger and stronger of the scenes, the
peace, and the innocence, described in the songs he
had learned, and the beauty and manliness and
goodness pictured in them, seemed, in his own
words, to take a divine shape and lead him away
from iniquity. And that old and miserable man
wept while he remembered how Scotland's songs
had been instrumental in keeping a damning stain
from his darkened but still immortal soul. The old
belief that guardian spirits ever hover round the
paths of men, covered with the misty mantle of
superstition a mighty truth, for every beautiful and
pure and good thought which the heart holds, is an
angel of mercy, purifying and guarding the soul. —
Robert Nicoll.
STANZAS.
WRITTEN BIT A YOUNG LADY.
Fair Nature smiled in all her bowers.
But Man the master work of God,
Unconscious of his latent powers,
The tangled forest trod.
Without a hope, without an aim,
Beyond the slotli's, the tiger's life;
His only pleasure sleep, or strife —
And war his only fame !
Furious alike and ceaseless beam'd
His lasting hate, and transient love,
And every mother's instinct seem'd
The fondness of the dove;
The mental world was wrapt in night,
Though some, the diamonds of the mine,
Burst tlirough the shrouding gloom to shir.e.
With self-emitted light