of his heart, would at once
restore his intellectual powers in all their fullness, and that, far
towards their sunset: but that the strong will on which he prided
himself, though it could trample upon pain, silence grief, and compel
industry, never could warm his imagination, or clear the judgment in his
darker hours.

I believe that this power of the heart over the intellect is common to
all great men: but what the special character of emotion was, that alone
could lift Scott above the power of death, I am about to ask the reader,
in a little while, to observe with joyful care.

The first series of romances then, above named, are all that exhibit the
emphasis of his unharmed faculties. The second group, composed in the
three years subsequent to illness all but mortal, bear every one of them
more or less the seal of it.

They consist of the _Bride of Lammermuir_, _Ivanhoe_, the _Monastery_,
the _Abbot_, _Kenilworth_, and the _Pirate_.[167] The marks of broken
health on all these are essentially twofold--prevailing melancholy, and
fantastic improbability. Three of the tales are agonizingly tragic, the
_Abbot_ scarcely less so in its main event, and _Ivanhoe_ deeply wounded
through all its bright panoply; while even in that most powerful of the
series, the impossible archeries and axestrokes, the incredibly
opportune appearances of Locksley, the death of Ulrica, and the
resuscitation of Athelstane, are partly boyish, partly feverish. Caleb
in the _Bride_, Triptolemus and Halcro in the _Pirate_, are all
laborious, and the first incongruous; half a volume of the _Abbot_ is
spent in extremely dull detail of Roland's relations with his
fellow-servants and his mistress, which have nothing whatever to do with
the future story; and the lady of Avenel herself disappears after the
first volume, 'like a snaw wreath when it's thaw, Jeanie.' The public
has for itself pronounced on the _Monastery_, though as much too harshly
as it has foolishly praised the horrors of _Ravenswood_ and the nonsense
of _Ivanhoe_; because the modern public finds in the torture and
adventure of these, the kind of excitement which it seeks at an opera,
while it has no sympathy whatever with the pastoral happiness of
Glendearg, or with the lingering simplicities of superstition which give
historical likelihood to the legend of the White Lady.

But both this despised tale and its sequel have Scott's heart in them.
The first was begun to refresh himself in