The Book of Scottish Song/To the Clyde

To the Clyde.

[This solemn dirge "To the Clyde" is by Dugald Moore, a poet of very superior power, and well known and highly appreciated in the west of Scotland, though probably his fame has not greatly extended beyond that district, in consequence of his never having cultivated notoriety, during his life, in the periodicals of the day. Dugald Moore was born in Stockwell Street, Glasgow, in August, 1805, of parents in humble circumstances, and was apprenticed to Mr. James Lumsden, stationer and copper-plate engraver, Queen Street, in whom he found his earliest and most efficient patron. By Mr. Lumsden's exertions, his first work, "The African and other Poems," was brought out in 1829. This was succeeded by no fewer than five other volumes of poems, all published between the years 1829 and 1839, and all liberally subscribed for. The success of his early publications enabled Mr. Moore to set up as a bookseller and stationer in his native city, where he acquired a good business, and was gradually rising in wealth and reputation, when he was suddenly cut off by inflammation, on the 2d of January, 1841. He died unmarried, having resided all his life with his mother, to whom he was much attached. In the Necropolis, where he lies buried, a massive monument, surmounted by a bust, is erected to his memory, by his personal friends and admirers.—Dugald Moore was pre-eminently "self-taught," his education having been of the most scanty description. All his works, though subject in some cases to objection on the score of accuracy or sound taste, display unequivocal marks of genius. He possessed a vigorous and fertile imagination, great force of diction, and freedom of versification. His muse loved to dwell on the vast, the grand, the terrible in nature. He dealt little in matters of every-day life or every-day feeling. Hence we feel difficulty in selecting from his works any thing of a properly lyrical character. Even in the short piece here given, which contains one or two touches of exquisite beauty, he displays the usual bent of his genius, in viewing the Clyde, not as it is, but as it may become, in the revolutions of untold ages.]

When cities of old days
But meet the savage gaze,
Stream of my early ways,
Thou wilt roll,
Though fleets forsake thy breast,
And millions sink to rest—
Of the bright arid beauteous west
Still the soul.

When the porch and stately arch,
Which now so proudly perch
O'er thy billows, on their march
To the sea,
Are but ashes in the shower;
Still the jocund summer hour
From his cloud will weave a bower
Over thee.

When the voice of human power
Has ceased in mart and bower;
Still the broom and mountain flower
Will thee bless:
And the mists that love to stray
O'er the Highlands, far away,
Will come down their deserts grey
To thy kiss.

And the stranger brown with toil,
From the far Atlantic soil,
Like the pilgrim of the Nile,
Yet may come,
To search the solemn heaps,
That moulder by thy deeps,
Where desolation sleeps,
Ever dumb.

Though fetters yet should clank
O'er the gay and princely rank
Of cities on thy bank,
All sublime;
Still thou wilt wander on,
Till eternity has gone,
And broke the dial stone
Of old time.

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