Walter Scott - The Complete Poems of Sir Walter Scott

Francis Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review, complained of anti-Scottish feeling, and otherwise criticised his friend’s work in a way that alienated Scott, not from Jeffrey, but from the Review, and opened to John Murray a prospect of securing Scott for a contributor to another Review, the Quarterly, which he would found as a representative of other political opinions with which Scott would be more in accord. “Marmion” thus has a place in the story of the origin of the Quarterly Review. Of the great popularity of “Marmion,” Scott himself said at the time that it gave him “such a heeze that he had almost lost his footing.” The Letters introducing the several Books are, in all Scott’s verse, perhaps the poems that most perfectly present to us his own personality. They form no part of “Marmion,” in fact there had been a plan for their publication as a distinct book. As they stand they interweave the poet with his poem, making “Marmion,” too, a “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” in the first days of its publication. George Ellis playfully observed to Scott that “the personal appearance of the Minstrel who, though the Last, is by far the most charming of all minstrels, is by no means compensated by the idea of an author shorn of his picturesque beard, deprived of his harp, and writing letters to his intimate friends.” The Minstrel of the Lay was but a creature of imagination; the Minstrel of “Marmion” is Scott himself.

H. M.

To William Stewart Rose, Esq. Ashestiel, Ettrick Forest.

Table of Contents

November’s sky is chill and drear,

November’s leaf is red and sear:

Late, gazing down the steepy linn

That hems our little garden in,

Low in its dark and narrow glen

You scarce the rivulet might ken,

So thick the tangled greenwood grew,

So feeble thrilled the streamlet through:

Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen

Through bush and briar, no longer green,

An angry brook, it sweeps the glade,

Brawls over rock and wild cascade,

And foaming brown, with doubled speed,

Hurries its waters to the Tweed.

No longer Autumn’s glowing red

Upon our forest hills is shed;

No more, beneath the evening beam,

Fair Tweed reflects their purple gleam:

Away hath passed the heather-bell

That bloomed so rich on Needpath Fell;

Sallow his brow, and russet bare

Are now the sister-heights of Yair.

The sheep, before the pinching heaven,

To sheltered dale and down are driven,

Where yet some faded herbage pines,

And yet a watery sunbeam shines:

In meek despondency they eye

The withered sward and wintry sky,

And far beneath their summer hill,

Stray sadly by Glenkinnon’s rill:

The shepherd shifts his mantle’s fold,

And wraps him closer from the cold;

His dogs no merry circles wheel,

But, shivering, follow at his heel;

A cowering glance they often cast,

As deeper moans the gathering blast.

My imps, though hardy, bold, and wild,

As best befits the mountain child,

Feel the sad influence of the hour,

And wail the daisy’s vanished flower;

Their summer gambols tell, and mourn,

And anxious ask: “Will spring return,

And birds and lambs again be gay,

And blossoms clothe the hawthorn spray?”

Yes, prattlers, yes. The daisy’s flower

Again shall paint your summer bower;

Again the hawthorn shall supply

The garlands you delight to tie;

The lambs upon the lea shall bound,

The wild birds carol to the round,

And while you frolic light as they,

Too short shall seem the summer day.

To mute and to material things

New life revolving summer brings;

The genial call dead Nature hears,

And in her glory reappears.

But oh! my country’s wintry state

What second spring shall renovate?

What powerful call shall bid arise

The buried warlike and the wise;

The mind that thought for Britain’s weal,

The hand that grasped the victor steel?

The vernal sun new life bestows

Even on the meanest flower that blows;

But vainly, vainly may he shine,

Where glory weeps o’er Nelson’s shrine;

And vainly pierce the solemn gloom,

That shrouds, O Pitt, thy hallowed tomb!

Deep graved in every British heart,

Oh never let those names depart!

Say to your sons—Lo, here his grave,

Who victor died on Gadite wave;

To him, as to the burning levin,

Short, bright, resistless course was given.

Where’er his country’s foes were found,

Was heard the fated thunder’s sound,

Till burst the bolt on yonder shore,

Rolled, blazed, destroyed—and was no more.

Nor mourn ye less his perished worth,

Who bade the conqueror go forth,

And launched that thunderbolt of war

On Egypt, Hafnia, Trafalgar;

Who, born to guide such high emprize,

For Britain’s weal was early wise;

Alas! to whom the Almighty gave,

For Britain’s sins, an early grave!

His worth, who, in his mightiest hour,

A bauble held the pride of power,

Spurned at the sordid lust of pelf,

And served his Albion for herself;

Who, when the frantic crowd amain

Strained at subjection’s bursting rein,

O’er their wild mood full conquest gained,

The pride he would not crush restrained,

Showed their fierce zeal a worthier cause,

And brought the freeman’s arm to aid the freeman’s laws.

Hadst thou but lived, though stripped of power,

A watchman on the lonely tower,

Thy thrilling trump had roused the land,

When fraud or danger were at hand;

By thee, as by the beacon-light,

Our pilots had kept course aright;

As some proud column, though alone,

Thy strength had propped the tottering throne:

Now is the stately column broke,

The beacon-light is quenched in smoke,

The trumpet’s silver sound is still,

The warder silent on the hill!

Oh think, how to his latest day,

When Death, just hovering, claimed his prey,

With Palinure’s unaltered mood,

Firm at his dangerous post he stood;

Each call for needful rest repelled,

With dying hand the rudder held,

Till in his fall, with fateful sway,

The steerage of the realm gave way!

Then, while on Britain’s thousand plains

One unpolluted church remains,

Whose peaceful bells ne’er sent around

The bloody tocsin’s maddening sound,

But still, upon the hallowed day,

Convoke the swains to praise and pray;

While faith and civil peace are dear,

Grace this cold marble with a tear -

He who preserved them, Pitt, lies here!

Nor yet suppress the generous sigh,

Because his rival slumbers nigh;

Nor be thy requiescat dumb,

Lest it be said o’er Fox’s tomb.

For talents mourn, untimely lost

When best employed, and wanted most;

Mourn genius high, and lore profound,

And wit that loved to play, not wound;

And all the reasoning powers divine,

To penetrate, resolve, combine;

And feelings keen, and fancy’s glow -

They sleep with him who sleeps below:

And if thou mourn’st they could not save

From error him who owns this grave,

Be every harsher thought suppressed,

And sacred be the last long rest.

HERE, where the end of earthly things

Lays heroes, patriots, bards, and kings;

Where stiff the hand, and still the tongue,

Of those who fought, and spoke, and sung;

HERE, where the fretted aisles prolong

The distant notes of holy song,

As if some angel spoke again,