They lighted a taper at the dead of night,
    And chanted their holiest hymn;
  But her brow and her bosom were damp with affright
    Her eye was all sleepless and dim! 
  And the lady of Elderslie wept for her lord,
    When a death-watch beat in her lonely room,
  When her curtain had shook of its own accord;
    And the raven had flapp’d at her window-board,
  To tell of her warrior’s doom!

    Now sing you the death-song, and loudly pray
    For the soul of my knight so dear;
  And call me a widow this wretched day,
    Since the warning of God is here! 
  For night-mare rides on my strangled sleep: 
    The lord of my bosom is doomed to die: 
  His valorous heart they have wounded deep;
  And the blood-red tears shall his country weep,
    For Wallace of Elderslie!

  Yet knew not his country that ominous hour,
    Ere the loud matin bell was rung,
  That a trumpet of death on an English tower
    Had the dirge of her champion sung! 
  When his dungeon light look’d dim and red
    On the high-born blood of a martyr slain,
  No anthem was sung at his holy death-bed;
  No weeping was there when his bosom bled—­
    And his heart was rent in twain!

  Oh, it was not thus when his oaken spear
    Was true to that knight forlorn;
  And the hosts of a thousand were scatter’d like deer,
    At the blast of the hunter’s horn;
  When he strode on the wreck of each well-fought field
    With the yellow-hair’d chiefs of his native land;
  For his lance was not shiver’d on helmet or shield—­
  And the sword that seem’d fit for Archangel to wield,
    Was light in his terrible hand!

  Yet bleeding and bound, though her Wallace wight
    For his long-lov’d country die,
  The bugle ne’er sung to a braver knight
    Than Wallace of Elderslie! 
  But the day of his glory shall never depart,
    His head unentomb’d shall with glory be balm’d,
  From its blood-streaming altar his spirit shall start;
  Though the raven has fed on his mouldering heart,
    A nobler was never embalm’d!

From Argyleshire, where his residence was not a protracted one, Campbell removed to Edinburgh.  There he soon became introduced to some of the first men of the age, whose friendship and kindness could not fail to stimulate a mind like that of Campbell.  He became intimate with the late Dugald Stewart; and almost every other leading professor of the University of Edinburgh was his friend.  While in Edinburgh, he brought out his celebrated “Pleasures of Hope,” at the age of twenty-one.  It is perhaps not too much to say of this work, that no poet of this country ever produced, at so early an age, a more elaborate and finished performance.  For this work, which for twenty years produced the publishers between two and three hundred pounds a year, the author received at first but L10, which was afterwards increased