ne shades of feeling in his
poems, or anything like the manifold harmonies of the richer arts,
they are not to be found, or, if such complicated shading is to be
found--and it is perhaps attempted in some faint measure in _The
Bridal of Triermain,_ the poem in which Scott tried to pass himself
off for Erskine,--it is only at the expense of the higher qualities of
his romantic poetry, that even in this small measure it is supplied.
Again, there is no rich music in his verse. It is its rapid onset, its
hurrying strength, which so fixes it in the mind.

It was not till 1808, three years after the publication of _The Lay_, that
_Marmion_, Scott's greatest poem, was published. But I may as well say what
seems necessary of that and his other poems, while I am on the subject of
his poetry. _Marmion_ has all the advantage over _The Lay of the Last
Minstrel_ that a coherent story told with force and fulness, and concerned
with the same class of subjects as _The Lay_, must have over a confused and
ill-managed legend, the only original purpose of which was to serve as the
opportunity for a picture of Border life and strife. Scott's poems have
sometimes been depreciated as mere _novelettes_ in verse, and I think that
some of them may be more or less liable to this criticism. For instance,
_The Lady of the Lake_, with the exception of two or three brilliant
passages, has always seemed to me more of a versified _novelette_,--without
the higher and broader characteristics of Scott's prose novels--than of a
poem. I suppose what one expects from a poem as distinguished from a
romance--even though the poem incorporates a story--is that it should not
rest for its chief interest on the mere development of the story; but
rather that the narrative should be quite subordinate to that insight into
the deeper side of life and manners, in expressing which poetry has so
great an advantage over prose. Of _The Lay_ and _Marmion_ this is true;
less true of _The Lady of the Lake_, and still less of _Rokeby_, or _The
Lord of the Isles_, and this is why _The Lay_ and _Marmion_ seem so much
superior as poems to the others. They lean less on the interest of mere
incident, more on that of romantic feeling and the great social and
historic features of the day. _Marmion_ was composed in great part in the
saddle, and the stir of a charge of cavalry seems to be at the very core of
it. "For myself," said Scott, writing to a lady correspondent at a time
when he