able talent and
humor, had formed a high notion of Scott's future eminence at
a very early period of his life. Dr. S. survived to a great
old age, preserving his faculties quite entire, and I have
spent many pleasant hours under his hospitable roof in
company with Sir Walter Scott. We heard him preach an
excellent circuit sermon when he was upwards of eighty-two,
and at the Judges' dinner afterwards he was among the gayest
of the company.]

I need not tell you, sir [he writes], with how much eagerness I
opened your volume--with how much glow I followed The Chase--or
with how much alarm I came to William and Helen. Of the latter I
will say nothing; praise might seem hypocrisy--criticism envy.
The ghost nowhere makes his appearance so well as with you, or
his exit so well as with Mr. Spenser. I like very much the
recurrence of

"The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee;"

but of William and Helen I had resolved to say nothing. Let me
return to The Chase, of which the metric stanza style pleases me
entirely; yet I think a few passages written in too elevated a
strain for the general spirit of the poem. This age leans too
much to the Darwin style. Mr. Percy's Lenore owes its coldness to
the adoption of this; and it seems peculiarly incongruous in the
ballad--where habit has taught us to expect simplicity. Among the
passages too stately and pompous, I should reckon--

"The mountain echoes startling wake--
And for devotion's choral swell
Exchange the rude discordant noise--
Fell Famine marks the maddening throng
With cold Despair's averted eye,"--

and perhaps one or two more. In the twenty-first stanza, I
prefer {p.236} Buerger's _trampling the corn into chaff and
dust_, to your more metaphorical, and therefore less picturesque,
"destructive sweep the field along." In the thirtieth, "On
whirlwind's pinions swiftly borne," to me seems less striking
than the still disapparition of the tumult and bustle--the earth
has opened, and he is sinking with his evil genius to the nether
world--as he approaches, _dumpf rauscht es wie ein fernes
Meer_--it should be rendered, therefore, not by "Save what a
distant torrent gave," but by some soun