1. In a letter of May 25, 1832, William Words-to her sick room.' The lines refer to half a dozen worth's daughter Dora mentions this as 'an affect-or more poems by William, including 'I wandered
ing poem which she [her aunt Dorothy] has written lonely as a cloud' (in line 18) and 'Tintern Abbey'
on the pleasure she received from the first spring (lines 45-52).
flowers that were carried up to her when confined
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50May 1832
. THOUGHT S O N M Y SICK-BE D / 40 5 With busy eyes I pierced the lane In quest of known and unknown things, ?The primrose a lamp on its fortress rock, The silent butterfly spreading its wings, The violet betrayed by its noiseless breath, The daffodil dancing in the breeze, The carolling thrush, on his naked perch, Towering above the budding trees. Our cottage-hearth no longer our home, Companions of Nature were we, The Stirring, the Still, the Loquacious, the Mute? To all we gave our sympathy. Yet never in those careless days When spring-time in rock, field, or bower Was but a fountain of earthly hope A promise of fruits & the splendid flower. No! then I never felt a bliss That might with that compare Which, piercing to my couch of rest, Came on the vernal air. When loving Friends an offering brought, The first flowers of the year, Culled from the precincts of our home, From nooks to Memory dear. With some sad thoughts the work was done, Unprompted and unbidden, But joy it brought to my hidden life, To consciousness no longer hidden. I felt a Power unfelt before, Controlling weakness, languor, pain; It bore me to the Terrace walk I trod the Hills again;? No prisoner in this lonely room, I saw the green Banks of the Wye, Recalling thy prophetic words, Bard, Brother, Friend from infancy! No need of motion, or of strength, Or even the breathing air: ?I thought of Nature's loveliest scenes; And with Memory I was there. 1978
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SIR WALTER SCOTT 1771-1832
Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh, but as a small boy, to improve his health, he lived for some years with his grandparents on their farm in the Scottish Border country (the part of southern Scotland lying immediately north of the border with England). This region was rich in ballad and folklore, much of it associated with the Border warfare between northern English and southern Scottish raiders. As a child Scott listened eagerly to stories about the past, especially to accounts of their experiences by survivors of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the last in a series of ill-fated attempts to restore to the throne of Britain the Stuart dynasty, who had been living in exile since 1688. The defeat of the ragtag army of Scottish Highland soldiers who had rallied around Charles Edward Stuart brought to an end not just the Jacobite cause but also the quasi-feudal power that the Highland chiefs had exercised over their clans. The Highlands' native traditions were suppressed by a government in London that was determined, to the point of brutality, to integrate all its Scottish subjects more fully into the United Kingdom. Ideally situated to witness these social and cultural transformations, Scott early acquired what he exploited throughout his work?a sense of history as associated with a specific place and a sense of the past that is kept alive, tenuously, in the oral traditions of the present.
Scott's father was a lawyer and he himself was trained in the law, becoming in 1799 sheriff (local judge) of Selkirkshire, a Border county, and in 1806 clerk of session? i.e., secretary to the highest civil court in Scotland?in Edinburgh. Scott viewed the law, in its development over the centuries, as embodying the changing social customs of the country and an important element in social history, and he often used it (as in The Heart of Midlothian and Redgauntlet) to give a special dimension to his fiction.
From early childhood Scott was an avid reader of ballads and poetic romances, which with his phenomenal memory he effortlessly memorized. He began his literary career as a poet, first as a translator of German ballad imitations and then as a writer of such imitations. In 1799 he set out on the collecting expedition that resulted in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802?03), his compilation of Border ballads. Motivating the collection was Scott's belief that the authentic features of the Scottish character were 'daily melting . . . into those of her . . . ally' (i.e., England), but he had fewer compunctions than modern folklorists about 'improving' the ballads he and assistants transcribed from the recitations of elderly peasant women and shepherds. Scott turned next to composing long narrative poems set in medieval times, the best-known of which are The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810). Although these 'metrical romances' were sensational best sellers (in 1830 Scott estimated that The Lay had sold thirty thousand copies) and helped establish nineteenth-century culture's vogue for medieval chivalry, Scott eventually gave up poetry for prose fiction. 'Byron beat me,' he explained, referring to the fact that his metrical romances ended up eclipsed by his rival's even more exotic 'Eastern tales.'
Scott continued to write lyric poems, which he inserted in his novels. Some of the lyrics, including 'Proud Maisie,' are based on the folk ballad and capture remarkably the terse suggestiveness of the oral form. Waverley (1814), which deals with the Jacobite defeat in 1845, introduced a motif that would remain central to Scott's fiction: the protagonist mediates between a heroic but violent old world that can no longer survive and an emerging new world that will be both safer than the old one? ensuring the security of property and the rule of law?and duller, allowing few opportunities for adventure. The novels negotiate between preserving the last traces of the traditional cultures whose disappearance they chronicle?for instance, the Scots superstitions and distinctive speech forms that feature in the ghost story that Wandering Willie recounts in Redgauntlet and the song, 'Proud Maisie,' that Madge
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THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL / 407
Wildfire sings in The Heart of Midlothian?and representing, through the long views of the novels' impersonal narrators, the iron laws of historical development, as those were expounded in the emerging Scottish Enlightenment disciplines of political economy, sociology, and anthropology. This approach to representing change, one that acquiesces in the necessity of social progress but also nostalgically acknowledges the allure of the backward past, was timely. It appealed powerfully to a generation that, following the British victory at Waterloo, was both eager to think that a new period in its history had begun and yet reluctant to turn its back on the past, not least because
