beneath the tall old ash-trees with the wind in their branches and the sunshine on their leaves. He caught his melody when
"——thoughts awake
By lone St. Mary's silent lake."
The battle of Flodden filled his mind when "he used to delight in walking his powerful black steed up and down by himself on the Porto Bello sands within the beating of the surge, and now and then you would see him plunge in his spurs, and go off as if at the charge, with the spray dashing about him. As we rode back to Musselburgh, he often came and placed himself beside me*[1] to repeat the verses that he had been composing during the pauses of our exercise." Lockhart remarks, "I well remember his saying, as I rode with him across the hills from Ashetiel to Newark one day in his declining years—'Oh, man, I had many a grand gallop among these braes, when I was thinking of Marmion, but a trotting canny pony must serve me now.'".
Scott apologising—ah, how needlessly!—for the exquisite epistles to his friends in "Marmion" says—"I was still young, light-hearted, and happy—and 'out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.'"
"Look on this picture and on this."
It would be sacrilege to alter one word of Lockhart's touching, deeply touching, description of his literary labours years afterwards.
"He read, and noted, and indexed, with the pertinacity of some pale compiler in the British Museum; but rose from such employment, not radiant and buoyant as after he had been feasting himself among the teeming harvests of fancy, but with an aching brow, and eyes on which the dimness of years had began to plant some specks, before they were subjected again to that straining over small print and difficult MS. which had no doubt been familiar to them in the early time, when, in Shortreed's phrase, 'he was making himself.' It was a pleasant sight when one happened to take a peep into his den, to see the white head erect, and the smile of conscious inspiration on his lips; while the pen, held boldly and at a commanding distance, glanced steadily and gaily along a fast blackening page of the 'Talisman.' It now often made me sorry to catch a glimpse of him; stooping and poring with his spectacles, amidst piles of authorities, a little note-book in the left hand, that had always been at liberty for patting Maida." Sir Walter himself often alludes in his Journal to his disinclination for composition, and the way in which, during the progress of Woodstock, he had to force his mind to the task. In one part, it is "I hope to sleep better to-night; if I do not, I shall get ill, and then I shall not be able to keep my engagements." Then come continual enumerations of the number of pages written, and remarks on the physical weakness. "I am a good deal jaded, and will not work till after dinner. There is a sort of drowsy vacillation of the mind attends fatigue with me:—I can command my pen as the school-copy recommends, but cannot equally command my thoughts, and often write one word for another." In addition are perpetual recurrences to the pecuniary difficulties in which he is involved:—difficulties whose endurance sets the rack and wheel at defiance; they are—
"Tortures the poor alone can know,
The proud alone can feel."
- ↑ * Mr. Skene
