On the cold flagstones, walled in by iron railings, there were no daisies and no moss; but I picked many of both from, the green turf around, which, with some sprigs of ivy from the walls, I send you.

It is strange that we turn away from the grave of this man, who achieved to himself the most brilliant destiny that ever an author did,—­raising himself by his own unassisted efforts to be the chosen companions of nobles and princes, obtaining all that heart could desire of riches and honor,—­we turn away and say, Poor Walter Scott!  How desolately touching is the account in Lockhart, of his dim and indistinct agony the day his wife was brought here to be buried! and the last part of that biography is the saddest history that I know; it really makes us breathe a long sigh of relief when we read of the lowering of the coffin into this vault.

What force does all this give to the passage in his diary in which he records his estimate of life!—­“What is this world? a dream within a dream.  As we grow older, each step is an awakening.  The youth awakes, as he thinks, from childhood; the full-grown man despises the pursuits of youth as visionary; the old man looks on manhood as a feverish dream.  The grave the last sleep?  No; it is the last and final awakening.”

It has often been remarked, that there is no particular moral purpose aimed at by Scott in his writings; he often speaks of it himself in his last days, in a tone of humility.  He represents himself as having been employed mostly in the comparatively secondary department of giving innocent amusement.  He often expressed, humbly and earnestly, the hope that he had, at least, done no harm; but I am inclined to think, that although moral effect was not primarily his object, yet the influence of his writings and whole existence on earth has been decidedly good.

It is a great thing to have a mind of such power and such influence, whose recognitions of right and wrong, of virtue and vice, were, in most cases, so clear and determined.  He never enlists our sympathies in favor of vice, by drawing those seductive pictures, in which it comes so near the shape and form of virtue that the mind is puzzled as to the boundary line.  He never makes young ladies feel that they would like to marry corsairs, pirates, or sentimental villains of any description.  The most objectionable thing, perhaps, about his influence, is its sympathy with the war spirit.  A person Christianly educated can hardly read some of his descriptions in the Lady of the Lake and Marmion without an emotion of disgust, like what is excited by the same things in Homer; and as the world comes more and more under the influence of Christ, it will recede more and more from this kind of literature.