apathetic exhaustion after the rack; if energy remains, it will be rather a dangerous energy—deadly when confronted with injustice.
Who has read the ballad of “Puir Mary Lee?”—that old Scotch ballad, written I know not in what generation nor by what hand. Mary had been ill-used—probably in being made to believe that truth which was falsehood: she is not complaining, but she is sitting alone in the snow-storm, and you hear her thoughts. They are not the thoughts of a model-heroine under her circumstances, but they are those of a deeply-feeling, strongly-resentful peasant-girl. Anguish bas driven her from the ingle-nook of home, to the white-shrouded and icy hills: crouched under the “cauld drift,” she recalls every image of horror,—“the yellow-wymed ask,” “the hairy adder,” “the auld moon-bowing tyke,” “the ghaist at e’en,” “the sour bullister,” “the milk on the taed’s back:” she hates these, but “waur she hates Robin-a-Ree!”
“
Oh! ance I lived happily by yon bonny burn—
The warld was in love wi’ me;
But now I maun sit ’neath the cauld drift and mourn,
And curse black Robin-a-Ree!
“Then whudder awa’ thou bitter biting blast,”
(Reader, do you hear the wild sound of this line, sweeping over the waste, piercing the winter-tempest?)
“And sough through the scrunty tree,
And smoor me up in the snaw fu’ fast,
And ne’er let the sun me see!
