an," etc.:

"O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand?"

In such a mood geography becomes poetry and names are music.[15] Scott
said to Washington Irving that if he did not see the heather at least
once a year, he thought he would die.

Lockhart tells how the sound that he loved best of all sounds was in his
dying ears--the flow of the Tweed over its pebbles.

Significant, therefore, is Scott's treatment of landscape, and the
difference in this regard between himself and his great contemporaries.
His friend, Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, testifies; "He was but half satisfied
with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with some
local legend." Scott had to the full the romantic love of mountain and
lake, yet "to me," he confesses, "the wandering over the field of
Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon
the celebrated landscape from the battlements of Stirling Castle. I do
not by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling of picturesque
scenery. . . . But show me an old castle or a field of battle and I was
at home at once." And again: "The love of natural beauty, more
especially when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our fathers'
piety[16] or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion." It was
not in this sense that high mountains were a "passion" to Byron, nor yet
to Wordsworth. In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott wrote of popular
poetry: "Much of its peculiar charm is indeed, I believe, to be
attributed solely to its _locality_. . . . In some verses of that
eccentric but admirable poet Coleridge[17] he talks of

"'An old rude tale that suited well
The ruins wild and hoary.'

"I think there are few who have not been in some degree touched with this
local sympathy. Tell a peasant an ordinary tale of robbery and murder,
and perhaps you may fail to interest him; but, to excite his terrors, you
assure him it happened on the very heath he usually crosses, or to a man
whose family he has known, and you rarely meet such a mere image of
humanity as remains entirely unmoved. I suspect it is pretty much the
same with myself."

Scott liked to feel solid ground of history, or at least of legend, under
his feet. He connected his wildest tales, lik