For the poetry of Tweed we have chiefly,
after Scott, to thank Mr. Stoddart, its loyal minstrel. "Dearer than all
these to me," he says about our other valleys, "is sylvan Tweed."
Let ither anglers choose their ain,
And ither waters tak' the lead
O' Hieland streams we covet nane,
But gie to us the bonny Tweed;
And gie to us the cheerfu' burn,
That steals into its valley fair,
The streamlets that, at ilka turn,
Sae saftly meet and mingle there.
He kept his promise, given in the following verse:
And I, when to breathe is a labour, and joy
Forgets me, and life is no longer the boy,
On the labouring staff, and the tremorous knee,
Will wander, bright river, to thee!
Life is always "the boy" when one is beside the Tweed. Times change, and
we change, for the worse. But the river changes little. Still he
courses through the keen and narrow rocks beneath the bridge of Yair.
From Yair, which hills so closely bind,
Scarce can the Tweed his passage find,
Though much he fret, and chafe, and toil,
Till all his eddying currents boil.
Still the water loiters by the long boat-pool of Yair, as though loath to
leave the drooping boughs of the elms. Still it courses with a deep eddy
through the Elm Wheel, and ripples under Fernilea, where the author of
the "Flowers of the Forest" lived in that now mouldering and roofless
hall, with the peaked turrets.
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