“For princely pomp or churchman’s pride! 
  On this bold brow a lordly tower;
  In that soft vale a lady’s bower;
  On yonder meadow, far away,
  The turrets of a cloister grey,” etc.

The most romantic scene was not romantic enough for Scott till his imagination had peopled it with the life of a vanished age.

The literary forms which Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which the greater part of his creative work was done, are three:  the popular ballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose.  His point of departure was the ballad.[24] The material amassed in his Liddesdale “raids”—­begun in 1792 and continued for seven successive years—­was given to the world in the “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border” (Vols.  I. and II. in 1802; Vol.  III. in 1803), a collection of ballads historical, legendary, and romantic, with an abundant apparatus in the way of notes and introductions, illustrating the history, antiquities, manners, traditions, and superstitions of the Borderers.  Forty-three of the ballads in the “Minstrelsy” had never been printed before; and of the remainder the editor gave superior versions, choosing with sureness of taste the best among variant readings, and with a more intimate knowledge of local ways and language than any previous ballad-fancier had commanded.  He handled his texts more faithfully than Percy, rarely substituting lines of his own.  “From among a hundred corruptions,” says Lockhart, “he seized, with instinctive tact, the primitive diction and imagery, and produced strains in which the unbroken energy of half-civilised ages, their stern and deep passions, their daring adventures and cruel tragedies, and even their rude wild humour are reflected with almost the brightness of a Homeric mirror.”

In the second volume of the “Minstrelsy” were included what Scott calls his “first serious attempts in verse,” viz., “Glenfinlas” and “The Eve of St. John,” which had been already printed in Lewis’ “Tales of Wonder.”  Both pieces are purely romantic, with a strong tincture of the supernatural; but the first—­Scott himself draws the distinction—­is a “legendary poem,” and the second alone a proper “ballad.”  “Glenfinlas,” [25] founded on a Gaelic legend, tells how a Highland chieftain while hunting in Perthshire, near the scene of “The Lady of the Lake,” is lured from his bothie at night and torn to pieces by evil spirits.  There is no attempt here to preserve the language of popular poetry; stanzas abound in a diction of which the following is a fair example: 

  “Long have I sought sweet Mary’s heart,
  And dropp’d the tear and heaved the sigh: 
  But vain the lover’s wily art
  Beneath a sister’s watchful eye.”

“The Eve of St. John” employs common ballad stuff, the visit of a murdered lover’s ghost to his lady’s bedside—­

  “At the lone midnight hour, when bad spirits have power”—­