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.