The best is undoubtedly The Weird of
Michael Scott, and these stanzas are a fair example of its power:

Then Michael Scott laughed long and loud:
'Whan shone the mune ahint yon cloud
I speered the towers that saw my birth--
Lang, lang, sall wait my cauld grey shroud,
Lang cauld and weet my bed o' earth!'

But as by Stair he rode full speed
His horse began to pant and bleed;
'Win hame, win hame, my bonnie mare,
Win hame if thou wouldst rest and feed,
Win hame, we're nigh the House of Stair!'

But, with a shrill heart-bursten yell
The white horse stumbled, plunged, and fell,
And loud a summoning voice arose,
'Is't White-Horse Death that rides frae Hell,
Or Michael Scott that hereby goes?'

'Ah, Laird of Stair, I ken ye weel!
Avaunt, or I your saul sall steal,
An' send ye howling through the wood
A wild man-wolf--aye, ye maun reel
An' cry upon your Holy Rood!'

There is a good deal of vigour, no doubt, in these lines; but one cannot
help asking whether this is to be the common tongue of the future
Renaissance of Romance. Are we all to talk Scotch, and to speak of the
moon as the 'mune,' and the soul as the 'saul'? I hope not. And yet if
this Renaissance is to be a vital, living thing, it must have its
linguistic side. Just as the spiritual development of music, and the
artistic development of painting, have always been accompanied, if not
occasioned, by the discovery of some new instrument or some fresh medium,
so, in the case of any important literary movement, half of its strength
resides in its language. If it does not bring with it a rich and novel
mode of expression, it is doomed either to sterility or to imitation.
Dialect, archaisms and the like, will not do. Take, for instance,
another poem of Mr. Sharp's, a poem which he calls The Deith-Tide:

The weet saut wind is blawing
Upon the misty shore:
As, like a stormy snawing,
The deid go streaming o'er:--
The wan drown'd deid sail wildly
Frae out each drumly wave:
It's O and O for the weary sea,
And O for a quiet grave.

This is simply a very clever pastiche, nothing more, and our language is
not likely to be permanently enriched by such words as 'weet,' 'saut,'
'blawing,' and 'snawing.' Even 'drumly,' an adjective of which Mr. Sharp
is so fond that he uses it both in prose and verse, seems to me to be
hardly an adequate basis for a new romantic movement.

However, Mr. Sharp does not always write in dialect. The Son of Allan
can be read without any difficulty, and Phantasy can be read with
pleasure. They are both very charming poems in their way, and none the
less charming because the cadences of the one recall Sister Helen, and
the motive of the other reminds us of La Belle Dame sans Merci. But
those who wish thoroughly to enjoy Mr. Sharp's poems should not read his
preface; just as those who approve of the preface should avoid reading
the poems. I cannot help saying that I think the preface a great
mistake. The work that follows it is quite inadequate, and there seems
little use in heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and proclaiming a
Renaissance whose first-fruits, if we are to judge them by any high
standard of perfection, are of so ordinary a character.