lose to me, and looking out
of the little latticed window of the then detached cottage called _the
chapel_, saw him and Tom Purdie pacing together on the green before
the door, in earnest deliberation over what seemed to be a rude daub
of a drawing; and every time they approached my end of their parade, I
was sure to {p.281} catch the words _Blue Bank_. It turned out in the
course of the day, that a field of clay near Toftfield went by this
name, and that the draining of it was one of the chief operations then
in hand. My friend Wilson meanwhile, who lodged also in the chapel,
tapped at my door, and asked me to rise and take a walk with him by
the river, for he had some angling project in his head. He went out
and joined in the consultation about the Blue Bank, while I was
dressing; presently Scott hailed me at the casement, and said he had
observed a volume of a new edition of Goethe on my table--would I lend
it him for a little? He carried off the volume accordingly, and
retreated with it to his den. It contained the Faust, and, I believe,
in a more complete shape than he had before seen that masterpiece of
his old favorite. When we met at breakfast, a couple of hours after,
he was full of the poem--dwelt with enthusiasm on the airy beauty of
its lyrics, the terrible pathos of the scene before the _Mater
Dolorosa_, and the deep skill shown in the various subtle shadings of
character between Mephistopheles and poor Margaret. He remarked,
however, of the Introduction (which I suspect was new to him), that
blood would out--that, consummate artist as he was, Goethe was a
German, and that nobody but a German would ever have provoked a
comparison with the Book of Job, "the grandest poem that ever was
written." He added, that he suspected the end of the story had been
left _in obscuro_, from despair to match the closing scene of our own
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Mr. Wilson mentioned a report that Coleridge
was engaged on a translation of the Faust. "I hope it is so," said
Scott; "Coleridge made Schiller's Wallenstein far finer than he found
it, and so he will do by this. No man has all the resources of poetry
in such profusion, but he cannot manage them so as to bring out
anything of his own on a large scale at all worthy of his genius. He
is like a lump of coal rich with gas, which lies expending itself in
puffs and {p.282} gleams, unless some shrewd body will clap it into a
cast-iron box, and compel the compressed element t