[The following verses are taken from James Grahame’s “The Sabbath.” Grahame was a native of Glasgow, and studied law and was admitted a member of the Society of Writers to the Signet, and shortly thereafter became a member of the Faculty of Advocates. In 1809 he was ordained by the Bishop of Norwich, and obtained the curacy of Sefton in July of the same year. His health was very uncertain by this time, and he passed away in 1811. His best known poem was “The Sabbath,” which appeared in 1804. Grahame was the first among Scottish writers, as Gilfillan points out, to salute the memory of the Scottish Covenanters with a melody of praise.]
“With each was holy: every hour
They stood prepared to die, a people doomed
To death—old men, and youths, and simple maids,
With them each day was holy: but that morn
On which the angel said, ‘See where the Lord
Was laid,’ joyous arose; to die that day
Was bliss. Long ere the dawn, by devious ways
O’er hills, through woods, o’er dreary wastes, they sought
The upland moors, where rivers, there but brooks,
Dispart to different seas. Fast by such brooks
A little glen is sometimes scooped, a plat
With green-sward gay, and flowers that strangers seem
Amid the heathery wilds, that all around
Fatigues the eye: in solitudes like these
Thy persecuted children, Scotia, foiled
A tyrant’s and a bigot’s bloody laws;
There, leaning on his spear (one of the array,
Whose gleam, in former days, had scathed the rose
Of England’s banner, and had powerless struck
The infatuate monarch and his wavering host),
The lyart veteran heard the Word of God
By Cameron thundered, or by Renwick poured
In gentle stream: then rose the song, the loud
Acclaim of praise; the wheeling plover ceased
Her plaint; the solitary place was glad,
And on the distant cairns, the watcher’s ear
Caught doubtfully at times the breeze-borne note.
But years more gloomy followed; and no more
The assembled people dared, in face of day,
To worship God, or even at the dead
Of night, save when the wintry storm raged fierce,
And thunder-peals compelled the men of blood
To couch within their dens: then dauntlessly
The scattered few would meet, in some deep dell
By rocks o’er canopied to hear the voice—
Their faithful pastor’s voice. He by the gleam
Of sheeted lightning ope’d the sacred book,
And words of comfort spake. Over their souls
His accents soothing came—as to her young
The heath-fowl’s plumes, when, at the close of eve,
She gathers in, mournful, her brood, dispersed
By murderous sport, and o’er the remnant spreads
Fondly her wings; close nestling ‘neath her breast,
They, cherished, cower amid the purple blooms.”