Or take again the “Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle,” an incident in the Wars of the Roses.  Lord Clifford, who had been hidden away in infancy from the vengeance of the Yorkists and reared as a shepherd, is restored to the estates and honours of his ancestors.  High in the festal hall the impassioned minstrel strikes his harp and sings the triumph of Lancaster, urging the shepherd lord to emulate the warlike prowess of his forefathers.

  “Armour rusting in his halls
  On the blood of Clifford calls;
  ‘Quell the Scot,’ exclaims the Lance—­
  Bear me to the heart of France
  Is the longing of the Shield.”

Thus far the minstrel, and he has Sir Walter with him; for this is evidently the part of the poem that he liked and remembered, when he noted in his journal that “Wordsworth could be popular[21] if he would—­witness the ‘Feast at Brougham Castle’—­’Song of the Cliffords,’ I think, is the name.”  But the exultant strain ceases and the poet himself speaks, and with the transition in feeling comes a change in the verse; the minstrel’s song was in the octosyllabic couplet associated with metrical romance.  But this Clifford was no fighter—­none of Scott’s heroes.  Nature had educated him.

  “In him the savage virtue of the Race” was dead.

  “Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
  His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
  The silence that is in the starry sky,
  The sleep that is among the lonely hills.”

Once more, consider the pronounced difference in sentiment between the description of the chase in “Hartleap Well” and the opening passage of “The Lady of the Lake”: 

  “The stag at eve had drunk his fill. 
  Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,” etc.[22]

Scott was a keen sportsman, and his sympathy was with the hunter.[23] Wordsworth’s, of course, was with the quarry.  The knight in his poem—­who bears not unsuggestively the name of “Sir Walter”—­has outstripped all his companions, like Fitz James, and is the only one in at the death.  To commemorate his triumph he frames a basin for the spring whose waters were stirred by his victim’s dying breath; he plants three stone pillars to mark the creature’s hoof-prints in its marvellous leap from the mountain to the springside; and he builds a pleasure house and an arbour where he comes with his paramour to make merry in the summer days.  But Nature sets her seal of condemnation upon the cruelty and vainglory of man.  “The spot is curst”; no flowers or grass will grow there; no beast will drink of the fountain.  Part I. tells the story without enthusiasm but without comment.  Part II. draws the lesson

  “Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
  With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.”

The song of Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper” derives a pensive sorrow from “old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago.”  But to Scott the battle is not far off, but a vivid and present reality.  When he visited the Trosachs glen, his thought plainly was, “What a place for a fight!” And when James looks down on Loch Katrine his first reflection is, “What a scene were here . . .