Ashestiel occupied as an abode a marked and joyous period of Scott's life. He was now a happy husband, the happy father of a lovely young family. Fortune was smiling on him. He held an honorable and to him delightful office, that of the sheriff of the county of Selkirk; which bound him up with almost all that border ballad country, in which he reveled as in a perfect fairy land. He was fast rising into fame, and in writing out the visions of poetry which were now warmly and rapidly opening upon his mind, he was located in a spot most auspicious to their development. The solitude of Ashestiel was only felt by him as a refreshing calm, for his spirit was teeming with life and action, and his rides over hill and dale, his coursing with his favorite dogs and friends, along the hills of Yair, "his burning of the water," in the deep and dark Tweed, which rolled sounding on beneath the forest banks below his house--that is, spearing salmon by torch-light: these were all but healthy and joyous set-offs to the bustle of inward life in the composition of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, The Lord of the Isles, of Waverley, and the active labors on Dryden, and a host of other literary undertakings. I believe Scott resided about seven years at Ashestiel; and it is amazing what a mass of new and beautiful compositions he worked off there. It was here that his poetic fame grew to its full height; and he was acknowledged, though Southey, Wordsworth, Campbell, and Coleridge were now pouring out their finest productions, to be the most original and popular writer of the day. There was to be one fresh and higher flight even by him, that of "The Great Unknown," and this was reserved for Abbotsford. There the fame of his romances began, there grew into its full-blown greatness; but here the sun of his poetic reputation ascended to its zenith. In particular, the poem of Marmion will forever recall the memory and the scenery of Ashestiel. The introductions to the several cantos, than which there are no poems in the English language more beautiful of this kind, are all imbued with the spirit of the place. They breathe at once the solitary beauty of the hills, the lovely charm of river, wood, and heath, and the genial blaze of the domestic hearth; on which love, and friendship, and gladsome spirits of childhood, and the admiration of eager visitors to the secluded abode of "The Last Minstrel," had made an earthly paradise. The summer rambles up the Ettrick or Yarrow, by Newark Tower, St. Mary's Loch, or into the wilds of Moffatdale, when "The lavroch whistled from the cloud: The stream was lively, but not loud; From the white-thorn the May-flower shed Its dewy fragrance round our head: Not Ariel lived more merrily Under the blossomed bough than we."