in their several provinces, but none of them has evinced the same capability of universal attainment Horace and Livy wrote in the language they had learned from their mothers, but its very acquisition was to Buchanan the result of much youthful labour. Yet he writes with the purity and elegance of an ancient Reman. Unfettered by the classical restraints which shrivel the powers of an ordinary mind, he expatiates with all the characteristic energy of strong and original sentiment; he produces new combinations of fancy, and invests them with language equally polished and appropriate. His diction uniformly displays a happy vein of elegant and masculine simplicity, and is distinguished by that propriety and perspicuity which can only be attained by a man perfectly master of his ideas and of the language in which he writes.[1] The variety of his
- ↑ It is probable that nineteen out of every twenty of the readers of these pages, are already aware of the great merit of Buchanan's poetry, without having ever seen or read a single line of it, either in its original, or in a translated form. I shall endeavour to correct this, by subjoining translations of three of his best small poems, executed by my esteemed friend, Mr Robert Hogg of Edinburgh, whose accurate taste and deep poetical sensibility are conspicuous in two articles already contributed by him to this work Dr Blacklock and Michael Bruce. It will be observed, from these compositions, which present the ideas and spirit of the original with wonderful fidelity, how different a poet Buchanan must have been from the still and conceited rhymesters of his own age and country.
ON THE FIRST OF MAY.
All hail to thee, thou First of May,
Sacred to wonted sport and play,
To wine, and jest, and dance and song,
And mirth that lasts the whole day long ,
Hail! of the seasons, honour bright,
Annual return of sweet delight ;
Flower of reviving summer s reign,
That hastes to time's old age again!
When Spring's mild air, at Nature's birth,
First breathed upon the new-form'd earth;
Or when the fabled age of gold,
Without fixed law, spontaneous roll'd
Such zephyrs, in continual gales,
Pass'd temperate along the vales,
And softened and refreshed the soil,
Not broken yet by human toil;
Such fruitful warmths perpetual rest
On the fair islands of the blest
Those plains where fell disease's moan,
And frail old age are both unknown.
Such winds with gentle Avhispers spread,
Among the dwellings of the dead,
And shake the cypresses that grow
Where Lethe murmurs soft and slow
Perhaps when God at last in ire
Shall purify the world with fire,
And to mankind restore again
Times happy, void of sin and pain,
The beings of this earth beneath
Such pure etherial air shall breathe.
Hail! glory of the fleeting year!
Hail ! day the fairest, happiest here !
Memorial of the time gone by,
And emblem of futurity !
ON NEÆRA.
My wreck of mind, and all my woes,
And all my ills that day arose,
When on the fair Neæsra's eyes,
Like stars that shine
At first, with hapless fond surprise,
I gazed with mine.
When my glance met her searching glance,
A shivering o'er my body burst.
