“All through the dawn, and as the day grew on From either side the shafts were showered amain, And fast the people fell. But at the hour When the lone woodman in the mountain glens Prepares his noonday meal, for that his arms Are weary with long labor, and his heart Had had its fill of felling the tall treen, And craving for sweet food comes over him; Just at that hour the Danai by sheer might Broke through their foemen’s ranks, each shouting loud To cheer his comrade on. First from the van Forth-leaping, Agamemnon slew a chief, Bienor,” and then he presses on through the Trojan host, to slay, and slay, and slay. III. Akin to this, and yet distinct from it, is the way of regarding Nature through the light of the human and especially the historic events which it has witnessed, and with which some particular spots have become indelibly associated. This, which I may call the historic coloring of Nature, has been, of course, the slow accretion of the ages, and only in quite modern times is it a prominent feature in the poets. The poets of Greece and Rome, proud as they were of the deeds of their countrymen, do not seem to have visited their great battle-fields nor to have hung on the scenery that surrounded them with that romantic interest which modern poets do. Marathon, Thermopylæ, Salamis, names of glory as they were, and often on their lips, became to the Greek imagination names for deeds, abstractions of national achievement, rather than actual localities to be visited and gazed on for their own sakes and for the memories they enshrined. It is an English, not a Greek, poet who seizes the great features of the immortal plain, and sings— “The mountains look on Marathon, And Marathon looks on the sea.” The same, too, who, alluding to the great sea-fight, gives the scenery also:— “A king sat on the rocky brow That looks o’er sea-born Salamis, And ships in thousands lay below, And men in nations all were his. He counted them at break of day, And when the sun set where were they?” Perhaps of all modern poets, Walter Scott is the one who has looked on the earth most habitually as seen through the coloring with which historic events and great historic names have invested it. It is not only that he has in his romantic epics described the actual features of the fields of Flodden and of Bannockburn with a minuteness foreign to the genius of the ancients. He has done this. But, besides, wherever he set his foot in his native land—not in a battle-field alone, but by ruined keep or solitary moor, or rocky sea-shore or western island—there rose before his eye the human forms either of the heroic past or of the lowlier peasantry, and if no actual record hung among them, his imagination supplied the want, and peopled the places with characters appropriate, which shall remain interwoven with the very features of the scenes while the name of Scotland lasts.