If Scott's reverie was less lofty than Milton's, so also was his story.

It seems to me as fitting to describe the relation between the poet and his theme in the one case as in the other.

What can be more truly a part of _Marmion_, as a poem, though not as a story, than that introduction to the first canto in which Scott expresses his passionate sympathy with the high national feeling of the moment, in his tribute to Pitt and Fox, and then reproaches himself for attempting so great a subject and returns to what he calls his "rude legend," the very essence of which was, however, a passionate appeal to the spirit of national independence?
What can be more germane to the poem than the delineation of the strength the poet had derived from musing in the bare and rugged solitudes of St.Mary's Lake, in the introduction to the second canto?
Or than the striking autobiographical study of his own infancy which I have before extracted from the introduction to the third?
It seems to me that _Marmion_ without these introductions would be like the hills which border Yarrow, without the stream and lake in which they are reflected.
Never at all events in any later poem was Scott's touch as a mere painter so terse and strong.

What a picture of a Scotch winter is given in these few lines:-- "The sheep before the pinching heaven To shelter'd dale and down are driven, Where yet some faded herbage pines, And yet a watery sunbeam shines: In meek despondency they eye The wither'd sward and wintry sky, And from beneath their summer hill Stray sadly by Glenkinnon's rill." Again, if Scott is ever Homeric (which I cannot think he often is), in spite of Sir Francis Doyle's able criticism,--( he is too short, too sharp, and too eagerly bent on his rugged way, for a poet who is always delighting to find loopholes, even in battle, from which to look out upon the great story of human nature), he is certainly nearest to it in such a passage as this:-- "The Isles-men carried at their backs The ancient Danish battle-axe.
They raised a wild and wondering cry As with his guide rode Marmion by.
Loud were their clamouring tongues, as when The clanging sea-fowl leave the fen, And, with their cries discordant mix'd, Grumbled and yell'd the pipes betwixt." In hardly any of Scott's poetry do we find much of what is called the _curiosa felicitas_ of expression,--the magic use of _words_, as distinguished from the mere general effect of vigour, purity, and concentration of purpose.

But in _Marmion_ occasionally we do find such a use.