Mr Scrope's first visit to the Tweed was made before the "Ariosto of the North" had sung those undying strains which have since added so much associated interest to the finely varied courses of that fair river. But many fond lovers of nature, then as now, "Though wanting the accomplishment of verse," were well acquainted with all its unrecorded beauties. "What stranger," asks our author, "just emerging from the angular enclosures of the south, scored and subdued by tillage, would not feel his heart expand at the first sight of the heathy mountains, swelling out into vast proportions, over which man had no dominion? At the dawn of day he sees, perhaps, the mist ascending slowly up the dusky river, taking its departure to some distant undefined region; below the mountain range his sight rests upon a deep and narrow glen, gloomy with woods, shelving down to its centre. What is hid in that mysterious mass the eye may not visit; but a sound comes down from afar, as of the rushing and din of waters. It is the voice of the Tweed, as it bursts from the melancholy hills, and comes rejoicing down the sunny vale, taking its free course through the haugh, and glittering amongst sylvan bowers--swelling out at times fair and ample, and again contracted into gorges and sounding cataracts--lost for a space in its mazes behind a jutting brae, and re-appearing in dashes of light through bolls of trees opposed to it in shadow. "Thus it holds its fitful course. The stranger might wander in the quiet vale, and far below the blue summits he might see the shaggy flock grouped upon some sunny knoll, or struggling among the scattered birch-trees, and lower down on the haugh, his eye perchance might rest awhile on some cattle standing on a tongue of land by the margin of the river, with their dark and rich brown forms opposed to the brightness of the waters. All these outward pictures he might see and feel; but he would see no farther: the lore had not spread its witchery over the scene--the legends slept in oblivion. The stark moss-trooper, and the clanking stride of the warrior, had not again started into life; nor had the light blazed gloriously in the sepulchre of the wizard with the mighty book. The slogan swelled not anew upon the gale, sounding, through the glens and over the misty mountains; nor had the minstrel's harp made music in the stately halls of Newark, or beside the lonely braes of Yarrow.