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[180] Songs of love and wailing lyke-wake,
And the merry fair's carouse;
Of the wild Red Fox of Erin
And the Woman of Three Cows,
By the blazing hearths of winter,
Pleasant seemed his simple tales,
Midst the grimmer Yorkshire legends
And the mountain myths of Wales.
How the souls in Purgatory
Scrambled up from fate forlorn,
On St. Even's sackcloth ladder,
Slyly hitched to Satan's horn.
Of the fiddler who at Tara
Played all night to ghosts of kings;
Of the brown dwarfs, and the fairies
Dancing in their moorland rings!
Jolliest of our birds of singing,
Best he loved the Bob-o-link.
‘Hush!’ he'd say, “the tipsy fairies!
Hear the little folks in drink!”
Merry-faced, with spade and fiddle,
Singing through the ancient town,
Only this, of poor Hugh Tallant,
Hath Tradition handed down.
Not a stone his grave discloses;
But if yet his spirit walks,
Tis beneath the trees he planted,
And when Bob-o-Lincoln talks;
Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1888-89.
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