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His eyes went to and fro.

Ha ha!' quoth he, 'full plain I see, The Devil knows how to row.'

"And now, all in my own countree,

I stood on the firm land!

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The Hermit stepped forth from the boat,
And scarcely he could stand.

"O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!'

The Hermit crossed his brow.

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'Say quick,' quoth he, 'I bid thee say

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"I pass, like night, from land to land;

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"O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been. Alone on a wide, wide sea:

So lonely 't was, that God himself.

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Old men, and babes, and loving friends,
And youths and maidens gay!

"Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! —
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

"He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,

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Is gone; and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the Bridegroom's door.

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He went like one that hath been stunned,

And is of sense forlorn :

A sadder and a wiser man
He rose the morrow morn.

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WALTER SCOTT

1771-1832

SCOTT is as distinctly the type of the Scottish gentleman as Burns is of the Scottish peasant. Descended on both sides from old families of the Scottish border, he divided his childhood between his own romantic town of Edinburgh and a country district where every river, field, and hill had its song or story.

He was from early youth a voracious reader, particularly in the fields of medieval history and old tradition. He was one of the first of English poets to come under the influence of the romantic literature of Germany, and his earliest attempts in verse were translations or imitations of German poetry. In 1802 he published a collection of old ballads, the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, many of which he had himself taken down from the lips of the few old men or women of the Border country who still remembered these swiftly perishing treasures of past ages. His first long poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, is founded upon these ballads and creates anew the old world of the Borders, with its gentle ladies and hard-riding moss troopers, its fierce passions and gloomy superstitions. In his next work, Marmion, Scott tried his hand on a graver theme, one of the old wars between England and Scotland, and the crushing defeat of the latter country at Flodden. In the great battle piece with which the poem closes we find Scott at his very best. The Lady of the Lake, which appeared two years after Marmion, opened to English readers the hitherto unknown world of the Scotch Highlands. It proved the most successful, as it is certainly the most finished and charming, of his metrical romances.

Scott's later poems, Rokeby, The Lord of the Isles, and others, show traces of decline. He seems to have worked out the vein of the metrical romance and was already turning to new fields.

Waverley, the first of his great prose stories, appeared in the summer of 1814, and from that time till just before his death Scott poured out a succession of novels and romances, which have given him even greater fame than his poems.

In 1826 the failure of the publishing house in which Scott was a silent partner left him confronted with an enormous debt of over half a million dollars. With a true gentleman's horror of failing to pay his debts he declined to go into bankruptcy and set himself resolutely to pay off the vast sum with his pen. The last years of his life were given over to this task. He did much; but, old and wearied as he was, his strength failed him before the whole was accomplished, and he broke down utterly. After a vain attempt to regain his health by foreign travel, he returned to die in Scotland. He was buried in the ruined Abbey of Dryburgh, within sound of his favorite stream, the Tweed,fit resting place for such a lover of the wild scenery and old romance of his native land.

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As an artist in verse Scott was inferior to most of his contemporaries, but he was the best story-teller in English poetry since Dryden, and he had a gift of song unknown to Dryden or to Dryden's successors in the eighteenth century. It is quite impossible to do Scott justice in selections; to know him at his best we must read his longer poems. But the songs and ballads here printed give at least some idea of his chief characteristics, his old-world loyalty, his love of romance, and his charming lyric note.

From

THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL

BREATHES THERE A MAN WITH SOUL SO DEAD

I

BREATHES there a man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned,
From wandering on a foreign strand!

If such there breathe, go, mark him well.;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And doubly dying, shall go down

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To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.

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II

O Caledonia! stern and wild,

Meet nurse for a poetic child!

Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,

Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand

Can e'er untie the filial band

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That knits me to thy rugged strand!

Still, as I view each well-known scene,

Think what is now, and what hath been,
Seems as, to me, of all bereft,

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