“Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone.” (Here is more than the tangible picture; the smoke wreaths have put unseen dwellers there); and again:-- “O Sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! I have learned To look on Nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity! Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of men A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods And mountains.” This will emphasize the distinction, to which I would call attention, in the treatment of landscape by the two poets: Wordsworth putting _his_ all on a simmer with humanities and far-reaching meditative hopes and languors; and Scott throwing windows wide open to the sky, and saying only--look--and be glad! In those days Wordsworth had one reader where Scott had a hundred; and the one reader was apologetic and shy, and the hundred were loud and gushing. I think the number of their respective readers is more evenly balanced nowadays; and it is the readers of Scott who are beginning to be apologetic. Indeed I have a half consciousness of putting myself on this page in that category:--As if the Homeric toss and life and play, and large sweep of rivers, and of battalions and winnowed love-notes, and clang of trumpets, and moaning of the sea, which rise and fall in the pages of the _Minstrel_ and of _Marmion_--needed apology! Apology or no, I think Scott’s poems will be read for a good many years to come. The guide books and Highland travellers--and high-thoughted travellers--will keep them alive--if the critics do not; and I think you will find no better fore-reading for a trip along the Tweed or through the Trosachs than _Marmion_, and the _Lady of the Lake_. _The Waverley Dispensation._