Alas! they had been friends in youth But whispering tongues can poison truth, And constancy lives in realms above, And life is thorny and youth is vain, And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain. And thus it fared, as I divine, With Roland and Sir Leoline. Each spake words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother; But never either found another To free the hollow heart from paining. They stood aloof, the scars remaining, Like cliffs that had been rent asunder: A dreary sea now flows between, But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder Can wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once has been. WALTER SCOTT. NATIVE LAND. [From _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_.] Breathes there the 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 To the vile dust from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonored, and unsung. 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 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 Sole friends thy woods and streams are left: And thus I love them better still Even in extremity of ill. By Yarrow's stream still let me stray, Though none should guide my feeble way Still feel the breeze down Ettrick break, Although it chill my withered cheek; Still lay my head by Teviot's stone, Though there, forgotten and alone, The bard may draw his parting groan. SUNSET ON THE BORDER. [From _Marmion_.] Day set on Norham's castled steep And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep, And Cheviot's mountains lone: The battled towers, the donjon keep, The loop-hole grates where captives The flanking walls that round it sweep, In yellow luster shone. The warriors on the turrets high, Moving athwart the evening sky Seemed forms of giant height: Their armor; as it caught the rays, Flashed back again the western blaze, In lines of dazzling light.