SONG. Он, say not, my love, with that mortified air, For those raptures that still are thine own. Though April his temples may wreathe with the vine, Its tendrils in infancy curl'd, 'Tis the ardour of August matures us the wine, Whose life-blood enlivens the world. Though thy form, that was fashion'd as light as a fay's, Has assumed a proportion more round, And thy glance, that was bright as a falcon's at gaze, Looks soberly now on the ground, Enough, after absence to meet me again, EDITOR'S NOTES. SCOTT'S MINOR POEMS. THE publisher, Mr. Cadell, and the editor, Mr. Lockhart, of the "Author's Edition" of his works, inserted the Minor Poems just where they pleased. Thus with the first volume, The Lay, they bound up the very early ballad of William and Helen, translated from Bürger's Lenore (1796). In the autumn of 1796, Scott had visited the home of his first, in a strict sense his only, love, and had found that he wooed in vain. He had carried with him a richly bound copy of this early essay of his, the translated ballad, but it did not move the lady's heart. Nevertheless, as the fair one was obdurate, he tried the public with his poem. Bürger, in Germany, had begun the romantic habit of imitating the old popular ballads which Addison and Mr. Pepys only collected. Scott followed (indeed, Lady Wardlaw, in Hardyknute, had anticipated both Bürger and himself), and his translated or imitated ballads led him straight to The Lay, a romance based on and built up out of ballads. In the case of Lenore, Bürger recast an idea common in folk-lore. The grief of a bereaved person, pushed to impiety, awakens and torments the spirit of the dead friend, child, or lover, who appears to warn or punish the survivor. Thus the Dead Mother is current in Scandinavia and in Provence. In Modern Greece, it is a dead brother who comes back and carries away his sister, and the very dull old English ballad, The Suffolk Miracle, turns on the same theme. In Bürger it is the dead lover who bears off his bride to the remote churchyard. The version of Scott has vigour and merit, but he far outdid this early attempt in later imitations of the ballad. The original volume is so rare that I have never seen a copy. It attracted little notice in 1796, except from the friends of the poet. THE WILD HUNTSMAN. Scott has told the traditionary origin of this poem. The legend of the Wild Hunter may seem on a footing with the Greek myth of the divine nocturnal huntress, Artemis, or, in Germany, may be a relic of the belief in the hunter Odin. The sounds and dim sights of the midnight forest might readily be explained as the passage of the train of "Herne, the Hunter." But as to Le Grand Veneur of the time of Henri IV., whom Scott describes after Sully, he was seen in June, 1897, by an English lady resident near Fontainebleau! Bicycling across the forest about 8.30 P. M. in a pleasant late night, she heard all around a strange noise, Yak, Yak. While she was making guesses at the cause of the noise, a very tall black man, dressed in a tight-fitting sable suit, with a light cape fluttering on the shoulders, leaped out of a bracken bush, ran past her bicycle along the road, leaped into a dell, and disappeared. The lady, after turning around to watch him, bicycled on, and almost collided with a stag, which was gazing in a startled sort of way after the tall black man. After ringing her bicycle bell furiously, the lady induced the stag to leave the way open to her, and so went home much puzzled by her adventure. About a year later (May, 1898) she came across the story of Le Grand Veneur in one of Mr. Augustus Hare's books. She then led the peasants of the Forest on to talk, and found that they all had heard of Le Chasseur Noir, as they called the appearance which she had seen. M. Millet, the son of the celebrated painter of "The Angelus," also gave her some of the local traditions. The lady, Miss H-, then wrote out her narrative and sent it to me, as a friend of such legends. The story occurs not only in Sully's, but in several other Memoirs of the reign of Henri IV. The king made inquiries of the country people, who merely replied that they knew the Chasseur Noir, who did nobody any harm, and was believed by them to be the ghost of a huntsman accidentally slain in the time of Francois I. Scott is right in "thinking" that Sully did hear the noise of the chase, hard by, and came out to welcome the king, who was really distant several miles. An obvious explanation of the nocturnal chase is — poachers; but I have no theory as to the nature and purpose of the Chasseur Noir of 1897, with the yapping of his viewless hounds. Miss H-'s narrative was published in a local French newspaper, after she had communicated it to myself. Though her peasant neighbours knew people who had seen "The Sable Huntsman," not one of them had any experience at first hand. THE FIRE KING. It was in 1798 that Monk Lewis enlisted Scott as a contributor to his Tales of Terror, which came out in 1801. Lewis was then celebrated as author of The Monk, one of the many tales of the Terror school opened by Horace Walpole (1765) in The Castle of Otranto, and continued by Mrs. Radcliffe. From this "Terror" school arose the new romantic fiction, in direct opposition to the humour and horse-play of every-day life, as presented by Smollett and Fielding. Lewis's Alonzo the Fair, odd as it seems, had "rekindled in Scott's breast effectually," says Lockhart, "the spark of poetical ambition." Scott himself says that Lewis "had the finest ear for rhythm I ever met with, finer than Byron's." We now find Byron's ear painfully deficient, and wonder that Scott did not mention Coleridge. In The Minstrelsy (vol. iv., p. 80) Scott prints a letter of Lewis's, with criticisms, much needed, of bad rhymes, as "head" and "descried," "bride" and "bed," an innocent rhyme." In these letters will be found the facts about The Fire-King, which Scott wrote over a bottle, with Leyden and another friend. FREDERICK AND ALICE. Scott's 'note tells all that is needed, or is known, of this "Tale of Terror." THE BATTLE OF SEMPACH. Scott gave this to Blackwood for his then new and struggling magazine in 1818. Lockhart, and the Chaldee Manuscript, have shown that Scott was far from anxious to enter the strife between the magazine of Blackwood and the magazine of Constable. THE NOBLE Moringer. In the Life Lockhart tells how Scott composed this piece in a night of agony, to prove to himself that he had his mind in working order. It was during the same terrible illness that he dictated The Bride of Lammermuir, and entirely forgot every word of his own narrative. The idea of the poem occurs in many ancient ballads, as in Lord Bateman, certainly in origin not later than the thirteenth century. See Lord Bateman, in Professor Child's great collection of English and Scottish Ballads. SONGS. Of these, the two first were written for a collection of Welsh airs; the third imitates a favourite measure of Thomas Moore. The fourth is on an incident which Scott probably heard of from Wordsworth. Two dogs guarded the corpse of the Rev. Father Mackonochie, when lost a few years since in the snow in Lochaber, as faithfully, though not for so long a period, as did the terrier on Helvellyn. THE POACHER. This is a parody on Crabbe, and Song is a parody on Moore. Crabbe was pleased with The Poacher ("The man," said Crabbe, "whoever he is, can do all that I can, and something more"), and Moore had no cause to be displeased with The Song. ANDREW LANG. END OF VOLUME I. |