The Book of Scottish Song/Colonel Gardiner

Colonel Gardiner.

[This is another production of Sir Gilbert Elliot's, written in memory of Colonel James Gardiner, who fell at the battle of Prestonpans, in September, 1745. It may claim singularity as one of the few songs of the period not on the Jacobite side. The "Fanny fair," mentioned in the first stanza, was a daughter of the Colonel's, afterwards Mrs. Richmond Inglis, who died at Edinburgh in 1795. She was authoress of a poem called "Anna and Edgar, or Love and Ambition," published at Edinburgh in 1781, 4to. The poem of Colonel Gardiner is said to have been originally set to the tune of Barbara Allan, but it appears in Johnson's Museum to an old tune called Sawnie's Pipe.]

'Twas at the hour of dark midnight,
Before the first cock's crowing,
When westland winds shook Stirling's towers
With hollow murmurs blowing;
When Fanny fair, all woe begone.
Sad on her bed was lying.
And from the roin'd towers she heard
The boding screech-owl crying.

"O dismal night!" she said, and wept,
"O night presaging sorrow,
O dismal night!" she said, and wept,
"But more I dread to-morrow.
For now the bloody hour draws nigh,
Each host to Preston bending;
At morn shall sons their fathers slay,
With deadly hate contending.

"Even in the visions of the night,
I saw fell death wide sweeping;
And all the matrons of the land,
And all the virgins, weeping."
And now she heard the massy gates
Harsh on their hinges turning;
And now through all the castle heard
The woeful voice of mourning.

Aghast, she started from her bed,
The fatal tidings dreading;
"O speak," she cried, "my father's slain!
I see, I see him bleeding!"—
"A pale corpse on the sullen shore,
At morn, fair maid, I left him;
Even at the threshhold of his gate.
The foe of life bereft him.

"Bold, in the battle's front, he fell,
With many a wound deformed;
A braver knight, nor better man,
This fair isle ne'er adorned." —
While thus he spake, the grief-struck maid
A deadly swoon invaded;
Lost was the lustre of her eyes,
And all her beauty faded.

Sad was the sight, and sad the news,
And sad was our complaining;
But, oh! for thee, my native kind,
What woes are still remaining!
But why complain? the hero's soul
Is high in heaven shining;
May providence defend our isle
From all our foes designing!

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