"If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild but to flout the ruins gray. When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white, When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruined central tower; When buttress and buttress alternately Seem framed of ebon and ivory; When silver edges the imagery, And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die; When distant Tweed is heard to rave, And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave, Then go--but go alone the while-- Then view St. David's ruined pile; And, home returning, soothly swear Was never scene so sad and fair." The moon did not rise that night. I walked about the fields, lingered about the Cross in the market, looked expectantly at the Abbey, until two in the morning. "It was near the ringing of matin bell, The night was well nigh done." The moon did not rise, and neither did the white lady. It was not because there was a mist, a Scottish mist, over the heavens; they were clear, the stars were shining, and the pole star held true, Charles' wain--as Charles should in Bonnie Scotland--held true to the pole. But it was a late July moon, and those Eildon hills and their circling kin rose so high against the night sky--daytime they seemed modest enough--that the moon in this latitude as far north as Sitka did not circle up the sky. Neither does the sun in winter, so the guardian explained to me next day. Fair Melrose is fairest, o' nights, at some later or earlier time of the year. It was then that I resolved to return in December, on December 27, when the festival of St. John's is celebrated with torch lights in the ruins of the Abbey--and Michael Scot comes back to his own! But then I reflected that the moon is not always full on the Eve of St. John's. "I cannot come, I must not come, I dare not come to thee, On the Eve of St. John's, I must walk alone, In thy bower I may not be." I chose, years later, an October moon, in which to see it "aright." Viewed by day, Melrose is surely fair; fair enough to enchant mortal vision. It is the loveliest ruin in the land where reform has meant ruin, and where from Kelso to Elgin, shattered fanes of the faith proclaim how variable is the mind of man through the generations, and how hostile when it forsakes. Melrose is an old foundation. In truth the monastery was established at old Melrose, two miles farther down the Tweed, and is so lovely, so dramatic a corner of the Tweed, that Dorothy Woodsworth declared, "we wished we could have brought the ruins of Melrose to this spot." She missed the nearby murmur of the river as we do.