his story.
As his readers followed the fortunes of William of Deloraine or Roderick
Dhu, they traversed by sunlight and by moonlight landscapes of wild
romantic charm, and felt their beauty quite naturally, as a part of the
excitement of that wild life. They felt it the more readily because of a
touch of artificial stateliness in the handling, a slight theatrical
heightening of effect--from an absolute point of view a defect, but
highly congenial to the taste of the time. It was the scenic side of
nature which Scott gave, and gave inimitably, while Burns was piercing
to the inner heart of her tenderness in his lines "To a Mountain Daisy"
and "To a Mouse," while Wordsworth was mystically communing with her
soul, in his "Tintern Abbey." It was the scenic side of nature for which
the perceptions of men were ripe; so they left profounder poets to their
musings, and followed after the poet who could give them a brilliant
story set in a brilliant scene.

Again, the emotional key to Scott's poetry was on a comprehensible
plane. The situations with which he deals, the passions, ambitions,
satisfactions, which he portrays, belong, in one form or another, to all
men, or at least are easily grasped by the imaginations of all men. It
has often been said that Scott is the most Homeric of English poets; so
far as the claim rests on considerations of style, it is hardly to be
granted, for nothing could be farther than the hurrying torrent of
Scott's verse from the "long and refluent music" of Homer. But in this
other respect, that he deals in the rudimentary stuff of human character
in a straightforward way, without a hint of modern complexities and
super-subtleties, he is really akin to the master poet of antiquity.
This, added to the crude wild life which he pictures, the vigorous sweep
of his action, the sincere glow of romance which bathes his story--all
so tonic in their effect upon minds long used to the stuffy decorum of
didactic poetry, completed the triumph of _The Lay of the Last
Minstrel_, _Marmion_, and _The Lady of the Lake_, over their age.

As has been already suggested, Scott cannot be put in the first rank of
poets. No compromise can be made on this point, because upon it the
whole theory of poetry depends. Neither on the formal nor on the
essential sides of his art is he among the small company of the supreme.
And no one understood this better than himself. He touched the keynote
of his own power, though with too gr