It is odd that the poet of this essentially Highland river should be an English bard; for if we turn to see what our literature has to say of the Dee, we must turn to Byron. Yet Byron was, as he says, "half a Scot by birth, and bred a whole one." If his ancestors on the father's side "came over" (as he delighted to recall) with the Conqueror, he was not less proud to remember that his mother was of one of the best families of the "Gay Gordons," and that for over three centuries her people had possessed Gight. He went to Aberdeen in 1790, when but two years old; here he stayed till 1798, and during that time he visited again and again most of the finest spots on the Dee. Those mighty hills, those clear, flowing streams, were the earliest things he remembered, and he never failed to acknowledge how deep was the impression they made on him. "From this period I date my love of mountainous countries." Near the end of his life he sings, in "The Island"-- "The infant rapture still survived the boy, And Lochnagar with Ida look'd o'er Troy." His mention of Lochnagar--"dark Lochnagar"--reminds us how peculiarly his name is connected with that Deeside mountain of which he is the laureate. Here, too, sprang the strange child-love of the precocious boy for Mary Duff, with whose beauty the beauty of the country where he came to know her was indissolubly linked in his mind. The scenes in Greece, he says, carried him back to Morven (his own "Morven of snow"), and many a dark hill in that classic land made him "think of the rocks that o'ershadow Colbeen;" whilst the very mention of "Auld Lang Syne" brings to his mind the river Dee and "Scotland one and all, Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills and clear streams." In Moore's biography there are needlessly ingenious arguments to prove that it was not the Dee scenery that made Byron a poet. Of course not. _Poeta nascitur non fit_, to quote the old Latin saying, which puts the matter much more pithily than Moore. But scenery and early impressions determine the course of a poet's genius as surely as the nature of the ground determines the course of the stream. How much Celtic magic there is in all Byron's verses--the love of the wild and terrible and impressive in scenery, as in life! Byron's poetry is before all romantic, and so is Deeside scenery. In his revolt against conventionalities, and even (it must be said) against the proprieties and decencies, we can clearly trace a true Celtic revolt against the dull, hard, prosaic facts of life. Can it be said that if Byron had passed his early years among the Lincolnshire fens or the muddy flats of Essex, "Don Juan" or "Childe Harold" would have been what they are--if, indeed, they had ever existed?