to what he calls his “rude legend,” the very essence of which was, however, a passionate appeal to the spirit of national independence?  What can be more germane to the poem than the delineation of the strength the poet had derived from musing in the bare and rugged solitudes of St. Mary’s Lake, in the introduction to the second canto?  Or than the striking autobiographical study of his own infancy which I have before extracted from the introduction to the third?  It seems to me that Marmion without these introductions would be like the hills which border Yarrow, without the stream and lake in which they are reflected.

Never at all events in any later poem was Scott’s touch as a mere painter so terse and strong.  What a picture of a Scotch winter is given in these few lines:—­

    “The sheep before the pinching heaven
    To shelter’d dale and down are driven,
    Where yet some faded herbage pines,
    And yet a watery sunbeam shines: 
    In meek despondency they eye
    The wither’d sward and wintry sky,
    And from beneath their summer hill
    Stray sadly by Glenkinnon’s rill.”

Again, if Scott is ever Homeric (which I cannot think he often is), in spite of Sir Francis Doyle’s able criticism,—­(he is too short, too sharp, and too eagerly bent on his rugged way, for a poet who is always delighting to find loopholes, even in battle, from which to look out upon the great story of human nature), he is certainly nearest to it in such a passage as this:—­

    “The Isles-men carried at their backs
    The ancient Danish battle-axe. 
    They raised a wild and wondering cry
    As with his guide rode Marmion by. 
    Loud were their clamouring tongues, as when
    The clanging sea-fowl leave the fen,
    And, with their cries discordant mix’d,
    Grumbled and yell’d the pipes betwixt.”

In hardly any of Scott’s poetry do we find much of what is called the curiosa felicitas of expression,—­the magic use of words, as distinguished from the mere general effect of vigour, purity, and concentration of purpose.  But in Marmion occasionally we do find such a use.  Take this description, for instance, of the Scotch tents near Edinburgh:—­

    “A thousand did I say?  I ween
    Thousands on thousands there were seen,
    That chequer’d all the heath between
      The streamlet and the town;
    In crossing ranks extending far,
    Forming a camp irregular;
    Oft giving way where still there stood
    Some relics of the old oak wood,
    That darkly huge did intervene,
    And tamed the glaring white with green;
    In these extended lines there lay
    A martial kingdom’s vast array.”