"What beauties does Flora disclose! How sweet are her smiles upon Tweed! Yet Mary's, still sweeter than those, Both nature and fancy exceed. No daisy, nor sweet blushing rose, Not all the gay flowers of the field, Not Tweed, gliding gently through those, Such beauty and pleasure does yield." Hamilton of Bangour, best known for his "Braes of Yarrow," has an autumn and winter description of Tweedside which naturally suggests the like picture by Scott in the Introduction to Canto I. of "Marmion," and it is more than probable that Sir Walter had this in his mind when penning his own more perfect lines. PLATE 14 VIEW OF BEWCASTLE FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH PAINTED BY JAMES ORROCK, R.I. (_See pp. 44, 67, 72_) [Illustration] Robert Fergusson--Burns's "elder brother in the Muses," had his imagination fired by the memories of the Border, and was one of the first to celebrate that land over which lies the light of so much poetic fancy: "The Arno and the Tiber lang Hae run full clear in Roman sang; But, save the reverence o' schools! They're baith but lifeless dowy pools, Dought they compare wi' bonny Tweed, As clear as ony lammer-bead?" Wordsworth, too, sang of the "gentle Tweed, and the green silent pastures," though his winsome Three Yarrows is the tie that most endears him to the Lowland hearts. Since Scott's day the voices in praise of Tweed have been legion. "Who, with a heart and a soul tolerably at ease within him, could fail to be happy, hearing as we do now the voice of the Tweed, singing his pensive twilight song to the few faint stars that have become visible in heaven?" says John Wilson in his rollicking "Streams" essay (no "crusty Christopher" there, at any rate). Thomas Tod Stoddart, king of angling rhymers, "Angled far and angled wide, On Fannich drear, by Luichart's side; Across dark Conan's current," and all over Scotland, but found not another stream to match with the Tweed: "Dearer than all these to me Is sylvan Tweed; each tower and tree That in its vale rejoices; Dearer the streamlets one and all That blend with its Eolian brawl Their own enamouring voices!" Remember, too, Dr. John Brown's exquisite Tweed's Well meditation, a prose sermon to ponder over any Sabbath, and Ruskin's homely reverie--"I can never hear the whispering and sighing of the Tweed among his pebbles, but it brings back to me the song of my nurse as we used to cross by Coldstream Bridge, from the south, in our happy days-- "For Scotland, my darling, lies full in my view, With her barefooted lasses, and mountains so blue."