To the wedding of Shon Maclean
Twenty pipers together
Came in the wind and the rain
Playing across the heather;
Backward their ribbons flew
Blast upon blast they blew
Each clad in tartan new,
Bonnet and blackcock feather;
And every piper was fou,
Twenty pipers together!

At the wedding of Shon Maclean
They blew with lungs of leather,
And blythesome was the strain
Those pipers played together!
Moist with the mountain-dew,
Mighty of bone and thew,
Each with the bonnet of blue
Tartan and blackcock feather;
And every piper was fou,
Twenty pipers together!

At the wedding of Shon Maclean,
Twenty pipers together,
They blew with might and main,
Through wonderful lungs of leather!
Wild was the hullabaloo!
They stamped, they screamed, they crew!
Twenty strong blasts they blew,
Holding the heart in tether;
And every piper was fou,
Twenty pipers together!

The small stars twinkled over the heather,
As the pipers wandered away together
But one by one on the journey dropt,
Clutching his pipes, and there he stopt!
One by one on the dark hillside
Each faint blast of the bagpipes died,
Amid the wind and the rain!
And the twenty pipers at break of day
In twenty different bogholes lay,
Serenely sleeping upon their way
From the wedding of Shon Maclean.

I heard the trailing garments of the Night
    Sweep through her marble halls!
I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light
    From the celestial walls!

I felt her presence, by its spell of might,
    Stoop o’er me from above;
The calm, majestic presence of the Night,
    As of the one I love.

I heard the sounds of sorrow and delight,
    The manifold, soft chimes,
That fill the haunted chambers of the Night
    Like some old poet’s rhymes.

From the cool cisterns of the midnight air
    My spirit drank repose;
The fountain of perpetual peace flows there,—
    From those deep cisterns flows.

O holy Night! from thee I learn to bear
    What man has borne before!
Thou layest thy finger on the lips of Care,
    And they complain no more.

Peace! Peace! Orestes-like I breathe this prayer!
    Descend with broad-winged flight,
The welcome, the thrice-prayed for, the most fair,
    The best-beloved Night!