University of Virginia Library

V.

'Tis twelve o'clock at noon; and still
Heavily, heavily on the hill
The storm outwreaks his wintry will,
And flouts the blinded sun;
And now the base red-coated crew,
And the fiends in hell delight to view
The sanguine slaughter done.
But where be they, the helpless troop,
Spared by red murder's ruthless swoop—
The feeble woman, the maiden mild,
The mother with her sucking child,
And all who fled with timely haste
From hissing shot, and sword uncased?
Hurrying from the reeking glen,
They are fled, some here, some there;
Some have scrambled up the Ben
And crossed the granite ridges bare,
And found kind word and helping hand
On Appin's green and friendly strand;
Some in the huts of lone Glenure
Found kindly care and shelter sure,
And some in face of the tempest's roar,
Behind the shelving Buchailmore,
With stumbling foot did onward press
To thy Ben-girdled nook; Dalness;
And some huge Cruachan's peak behind
Found a broad shield from drift and wind,
And warmed their frozen frames at fires
Kindled by friendly Macintyres.
But most—O Heaven!—a feeble nation,
Crept slowly from the mountain station;
The old, the sickly, and the frail,
Went blindly on with straggling trail,
The little tender-footed maid,
The little boy that loved to wade
In the clear waters of the Coe,
Ere blood had stained their amber flow—
On them, ere half their way was made,
The night came down, and they were laid,
Some on the scaurs of the jaggèd Bens,
Some in black bogs and stony glens,
Faint and worn, till kindly Death
Numbed their limbs, and froze their breath,
And wound them in the snow.
And there they lay with none to know,
And none with pious kind concern
To honour with a cross or cairn
The remnant of Glencoe.
And on the hills a curse doth lie
That will not die with years;
And oft-times 'neath a scowling sky,
Through the black rent, where the torrent grim
Leaps 'neath the huge crag's frowning rim,
The wind comes down with a moan and a sigh;
And a voice, like the voice of a wail and a cry,
The lonely traveller hears,
A voice, like the voice of Albyn weeping
For the sorrow and the shame
That stained the British soldier's name,
When kingship was in butchers' keeping,
And power was honour's foe;
Weeping for scutcheons rudely torn,
And worth disowned and glory shorn,
And for the valiant-hearted men
That once were mighty in the glen
Of lonely bleak Glencoe.