she said,
Are these the bends o' Dee!"

He might have done more of the best, had he very greatly cared. Alone
among poets, he had neither vanity nor jealousy; he thought little of his
own verse and his own fame: would that he had thought more! would that he
had been more careful of what was so precious! But he turned to prose;
bade poetry farewell.

"Yet, once again, farewell, thou Minstrel Harp,
Yet, once again, forgive my feeble sway.
_And little reck I of the censure sharp_
_May idly cavil at an idle lay_."

People still cavil idly, complaining that Scott did not finish, or did
not polish his pieces; that he was not Keats, or was not Wordsworth. He
was himself; he was the Last Minstrel, the latest, the greatest, the
noblest of natural poets concerned with natural things. He sang of free,
fierce, and warlike life, of streams yet rich in salmon, and moors not
yet occupied by brewers; of lonely places haunted in the long grey
twilights of the North; of crumbling towers where once dwelt the Lady of
Branksome or the Flower of Yarrow. Nature summed up in him many a past
age a world of ancient faiths; and before the great time of Britain
wholly died, to Britain, as to Greece, she gave her Homer. When he was
old, and tired, and near his death--so worn with trouble and labour that
he actually signed his own name wrong--he wrote his latest verse, for a
lady. It ends--

"My country, be thou glorious still!"

and so he died, within the sound of the whisper of Tweed, foreseeing the
years when his country would no more be glorious, thinking of his country
only, forgetting quite the private sorrow of his own later days.

People will tell you that Scott was not a great poet; that his bolt is
shot, his fame perishing. Little he cared for his fame! But for my part
I think and hope that Scott can never die, till men grow up into manhood
without ever having been boys--till they forget that

"One glorious hour of crowded life
Is worth an age without a name!"

Thus, the charges against Sir Walter's poetry are, on the whole, little
more than the old critical fallacy of blaming a thing for not being
something else. "It takes all sorts to make a world," in poetry as in
life. Sir Walter's sort is a very good sort, and in English literature
its place was empty, and waiting for him. Think of what he did. English
poetry had long been very tame and commonplace, written in couplets like
Pope's, very