Billows on billows burst and boil,
Maintaining still the stern turmoil,
And to their wild and tortured groan
Each adds new terrors of his own! 1

Lifelike, again, is the glimpse of a later battle-Flodden -as fitfully descried by Marmion's Squires from a neighbouring hill-top:

They close, in clouds of smoke and dust,
With sword-sway, and with lance's thrust:
And such a yell was there,

Of sudden and portentous birth,
As if men fought upon the earth,
And fiends in upper air;

O life and death were in the shout,
Recoil and rally, charge and rout,
And triumph and despair.

At length the freshening western blast
Aside the shroud of battle cast;
And, first, the ridge of mingled spears
Above the brightening cloud appears;
And in the smoke the pennons flew,
As in the storm the white seamew;
Then mark'd they, dashing broad and far,
The broken billows of the war,

And plumed crests of chieftains brave,
Floating like foam upon the wave;

But nought distinct they see.

Wide raged the battle on the plain;

Spears shook, and falchions flash'd amain;
Fell England's arrow-flight like rain ;

Crests rose, and stoop'd, and rose again,
Wild and disorderly.2

All the incidents of warfare inflamed his Muse; if not a clash of battalions, an armed and perilous ambush. The blood stirs at the sudden apparition from heather and bracken of Clan Alpine's warriors true ':

Wild as the scream of the curlew,
From crag to crag the signal flew.
Instant, through copse and heath, arose
Bonnets and spears and bended bows ;
On right, on left, above, below,
Sprung up at once the lurking foe;
From shingles gray their lances start,
The bracken bush sends forth the dart,
The rushes and the willow-wand
Are bristling into axe and brand,
And every tuft of broom gives life
To plaided warrior arm'd for strife.
That whistle garrison'd the glen
At once with full five hundred men.
Watching their leader's beck and will,
All silent there they stood, and still.3

He was an equally glad interpreter of the pibroch of Donald Dhu, and of the proscribed and hunted Macgregors' owl's hoot :

Our signal for fight, that from monarchs we drew,
To be heard but by night in our vengeful haloo.1

In his case direct and long personal sympathy, not merely with the subject in general, but with its particular exemplifications, was virtually indispensable. Art for him did not supply its place in the least. Without it he is diffuse and dull. The spectacle, or expectation, of an exchange of hard blows had an aptitude for exciting his inspiration; but he had to be personally interested before even a pitched battle made a poem. Everything else-story-telling itself —is an accident in his poetry, except the personal emotion ; and that responded fortunately to other themes besides arms. Touch the key, in his rich memory, of an ancient legend, an historic edifice; and lovely music pours forth. Nowhere has minster, from the glory of its prime to eloquent decay, revealed itself to an insight more delicate

and sympathetic than Melrose to his fancy bridging, as with a rainbow, four hundred years:

If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright,

Go visit it by the pale moonlight;
For the gay beams of lightsome day
Gild, but to flout, the ruins gray.

When the broken arches are black in night,
And each shafted oriel glimmers white;
When the cold light's uncertain shower
Streams on the ruin'd central tower;
When buttress and buttress, alternately,
Seemed framed of ebon and ivory ;

When silver edges the imagery,

And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die;

When distant Tweed is heard to rave,

And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave,

Then go but go alone the while-
Then view St. David's ruin'd pile;
And, home returning, soothly swear,
Was never scene so sad and fair! 5

His mind was a treasure-house of tradition and romance from which a poet's magic conjured up memorial funeral rites for drowned Rosabelle in the ancestral mausoleum :

O'er Roslin all that dreary night

A wondrous blaze was seen to gleam;
'Twas broader than the watch-fire's light,
And redder than the bright moon-beam.

It glared on Roslin's castled rock,

It ruddied all the copse-wood glen,
'Twas seen from Dryden's groves of oak,
And seen from cavern'd Hawthornden.

Seem'd all on fire that chapel proud,
Where Roslin's chiefs uncoffin'd lie,

Each Baron, for a sable shroud,

Sheathed in his iron panoply.

And it was a poet's tyrant imagination in the grasp of the past which was needed to steel his heart for that tale of horror, the accurst monastic conclave in the murder-den of Holy Island, which makes one cry out upon the Fiend for not sparing perjured Marmion

but a day,

For wasting fire, and dying groan,

And priests slain on the altar-stone."

I have left to the last that which might at once, and by itself, have established the Border Minstrel's title to a poet's laurel. Surely in the front rank of requiems. stands that over Pitt and Fox. The two Titanic figures had filled the entire horizon of Scott's youth and early manhood; and the passion of his verse testifies to the impress on his nature. Yet never, like many of its class, does it foam into rhetoric, or rave into hysterics. It rises and falls like tidal waves. As the thought dwells on the broken health, and broken heart, of the mighty Minister, the melody is solemn and sad :

Had'st thou but liv'd, though stripp'd of power,

A watchman on the lonely tower,

Thy thrilling trump had roused the land,

When fraud or danger were at hand;

By thee, as by the beacon-light,

Our pilots had kept course aright;

As some proud column, though alone,

Thy strength had propp'd the tottering throne;
Now is the stately column broke,

The beacon-light is quench'd in smoke,

The trumpet's silver sound is still,

The warder silent on the hill! 8

The dirge grows rejoicingly triumphal as it unites him and
his rival in a common bond of renown and patriotism:
With more than mortal powers endow'd,
How high they soar'd above the crowd!
Theirs was no common party race,
Jostling by dark intrigue for place;
Like fabled gods, their mighty war
Shook realms and nations in its jar;
Beneath each banner proud to stand,
Looked up the noblest of the land,
Till through the British world were known
The names of Pitt and Fox alone.
Spells of such force no wizard grave

E'er framed in dark Thessalian cave.

These spells are spent, and, spent with these,
The wine of life is on the lees;

Genius, and taste, and talent gone,
For ever tomb'd beneath the stone,

Where-taming thought to human pride !—

The mighty chiefs sleep side by side.
Drop upon Fox's grave the tear,

'Twill trickle to his rival's bier;

O'er Pitt's the mournful requiem sound,
And Fox's shall the notes rebound.

The solemn echo seems to cry

'Here let their discord with them die.
Speak not for these a separate doom,
Whom Fate made Brothers in the tomb;
But search the land of living men.

Where wilt thou find their like agen?' 9