d rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills."

Once more, consider the pronounced difference in sentiment between the
description of the chase in "Hartleap Well" and the opening passage of
"The Lady of the Lake":

"The stag at eve had drunk his fill.
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill," etc.[22]

Scott was a keen sportsman, and his sympathy was with the hunter.[23]
Wordsworth's, of course, was with the quarry. The knight in his
poem--who bears not unsuggestively the name of "Sir Walter"--has
outstripped all his companions, like Fitz James, and is the only one in
at the death. To commemorate his triumph he frames a basin for the
spring whose waters were stirred by his victim's dying breath; he plants
three stone pillars to mark the creature's hoof-prints in its marvellous
leap from the mountain to the springside; and he builds a pleasure house
and an arbour where he comes with his paramour to make merry in the
summer days. But Nature sets her seal of condemnation upon the cruelty
and vainglory of man. "The spot is curst"; no flowers or grass will grow
there; no beast will drink of the fountain. Part I. tells the story
without enthusiasm but without comment. Part II. draws the lesson

"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."

The song of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" derives a pensive sorrow from
"old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago." But to Scott the
battle is not far off, but a vivid and present reality. When he visited
the Trosachs glen, his thought plainly was, "What a place for a fight!"
And when James looks down on Loch Katrine his first reflection is, "What
a scene were here . . .

"For princely pomp or churchman's pride!
On this bold brow a lordly tower;
In that soft vale a lady's bower;
On yonder meadow, far away,
The turrets of a cloister grey," etc.

The most romantic scene was not romantic enough for Scott till his
imagination had peopled it with the life of a vanished age.

The literary forms which Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which the
greater part of his creative work was done, are three: the popular
ballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose. His
point of departure was the ballad.[24] The material amassed in his
Liddesdale "raids"--begun in 1792 and continued for seven successive
years--was given to the world in the "Minstrel