"Of course it is. To the Celt, Nature is malign, evil-disposed, cruel; and his poetry is dreary as the strain of the night wind. To a Wordsworth, on the other hand, Nature is merciful and tranquil, deep-thoughted and calm; and as a consequence his poetry is temperate and humane, cool as a summer evening after the sun has set, and--with all reverence be it spoken--sometimes tiresomely hortatory." "Preaching is generally dull work, I fear; and Nature's sermons, even when reported by Wordsworth, are as dull as some other sermons which I have heard and read." "But what I was going to say was, that the sense of malevolence in Nature which you claim as the central fact of Celtic song and superstition, is not so much the result of harsh climates and wild environments as it is a stage in the mental progress of a race. At one stage of progress, all races fear Nature alike. The South-Sea Islander, whose bread-fruit falls into his mouth, fears Nature just as much as the Greenlander, who hunts the white bear on the iceberg and spears the walrus in the foam. When once man has got the upper hand of Nature, when he has made her his slave, when her winds sit in his sails and propel his ships, when she yields him iron whereby she is more firmly bound to his service, when she gives him coal wherewith to cook food and to mitigate the rigours of her winters--when man has got that length, the aboriginal fear dies out of his heart, the weird Celtic bard goes, and Wordsworth comes. Even in the Lowlands, scraps of verses still exist--relics of long past time, and shuddering yet with an obsolete terror--which are as full of a sense of the malevolence of Nature as any Highland song or tune you could produce." "Let me hear one or two." "Well, here is one which has been occasionally quoted, and which you have in all likelihood come across in your reading:-- 'Says Tweed to Till, What gars ye rin sae still? Says Till to Tweed, Though ye rin wi' speed, An' I rin slaw, For ae man that ye droon, I droon twa.'" "Yes, it is very striking, and hits the nail on the head exactly. Sir Walter quotes it somewhere, I think. I have little doubt that these rhymes suggested to Scott his Voices of the River in the 'Lay,' which is not that of the kelpie, a creature _in_ the river, but of the river itself, in spiritual personation." [Sidenote: "The dowie Dean."]