‘Soon as the midnight bell did ring, Alone, and arm’d, forth rode the King To that old camp’s deserted round: Sir Knight, you well might mark the mound, Left hand the town,-the Pictish race, The trench, long since, in blood did trace;The moor around is brown and bare, The space within is green and fair. The spot our village children know For there the earliest wild-flowers grow;But woe betide the wandering wight, That treads its circle in the night! The breadth across, a bowshot clear, Gives ample space for full career;Opposed to the four points of heaven, By four deep gaps are entrance given. The southernmost our Monarch past, Halted, and blew a gallant blast;And on the north, within the ring, Appeared the form of England’s King, Who then a thousand leagues afar, In Palestine waged holy war: Yet arms like England’s did he wield, Alike the leopards in the shield, Alike his Syrian courser’s frame, The rider’s length of limb the same:Long afterwards did Scotland know, Fell Edward was her deadliest foe.
XXIV.
‘The vision made our Monarch start, But soon he mann’d his noble heart, And in the first career they ran, The Elfin Knight fell, horse and man;Yet did a splinter of his lance Through Alexander’s visor glance, And razed the skin-a puny wound. The King, light leaping to the ground, With naked blade his phantom foe Compell’d the future war to show.Of Largs he saw the glorious plain, Where still gigantic bones remain, Memorial of the Danish war; Himself he saw, amid the field, On high his brandish’d war-axe wield, And strike proud Haco from his car, While all around the shadowy Kings Denmark’s grim ravens cower’d their wings. ‘Tis said, that, in that awful night, Remoter visions met his sight, Foreshowing future conquest far,When our sons’ sons wage northern war;A royal city, tower and spire, Redden’d the midnight sky with fire, And shouting crews her navy bore, Triumphant, to the victor shore.Such signs may learned clerks explain, They pass the wit of simple swain.
