e most ordinary experience. Perhaps for that reason he can on
occasion relate a preternatural incident, such as the appearance of
old Alice at the fountain, at the very moment of her death, to the
Master of Ravenswood, in _The Bride of Lammermoor_, with great effect.
It was probably the vivacity with which he realized the violence which
such incidents do to the terrestrial common sense of our ordinary
nature, and at the same time the sedulous accuracy of detail with
which he narrated them, rather than any, even the smallest, special
susceptibility of his own brain to thrills of the preternatural kind,
which gave him rather a unique pleasure in dealing with such
preternatural elements. Sometimes, however, his ghosts are a little
too muscular to produce their due effect as ghosts. In translating
Buerger's ballad his great success lay in the vividness of the
spectre's horsemanship. For instance,--

"Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash! splash! along the sea;
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee,"

is far better than any ghostly touch in it; so, too, every one will
remember how spirited a rider is the white Lady of Avenel, in _The
Monastery_, and how vigorously she takes fords,--as vigorously as the
sheriff himself, who was very fond of fords. On the whole, Scott was
too sunny and healthy-minded for a ghost-seer; and the skull and
cross-bones with which he ornamented his "den" in his father's house,
did not succeed in tempting him into the world of twilight and cobwebs
wherein he made his first literary excursion. His _William and Helen_,
the name he gave to his translation of Buerger's _Lenore_, made in
1795, was effective, after all, more for its rapid movement, than for
the weirdness of its effects.

If, however, it was the raw preternaturalism of such ballads as
Buerger's which first led Scott to test his own powers, his genius soon
turned to more appropriate and natural subjects. Ever since his
earliest college days he had been collecting, in those excursions of
his into Liddesdale and elsewhere, materials for a book on _The
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_; and the publication of this work,
in January, 1802 (in two volumes at first), was his first great
literary success. The whole edition of eight hundred copies was sold
within the year, while the skill and care which Scott had devoted to
the historical illustration of the ballads, and the force and s