“Fitz-Eustace’ heart felt closely pent: 
  As if to give his rapture vent,
  The spur he to his charger lent,
    And raised his bridle-hand,
  And, making demi-volte in air,
  Cried, ’Where’s the coward that would not dare
    To fight for such a land?’”

and the still more familiar opening of the sixth canto in the “Lay”—­“Breathes there the man,” etc.: 

  “O Caledonia! stern and wild,
  Meet nurse for a poetic child! 
  Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
  Land of the mountain and the flood,
  Land of my sires! what mortal hand
  Can e’er untie the filial band
  That knits me to thy rugged strand?”

In such a mood geography becomes poetry and names are music.[15] Scott said to Washington Irving that if he did not see the heather at least once a year, he thought he would die.

Lockhart tells how the sound that he loved best of all sounds was in his dying ears—­the flow of the Tweed over its pebbles.

Significant, therefore, is Scott’s treatment of landscape, and the difference in this regard between himself and his great contemporaries.  His friend, Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, testifies; “He was but half satisfied with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with some local legend.”  Scott had to the full the romantic love of mountain and lake, yet “to me,” he confesses, “the wandering over the field of Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon the celebrated landscape from the battlements of Stirling Castle.  I do not by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling of picturesque scenery. . . .  But show me an old castle or a field of battle and I was at home at once.”  And again:  “The love of natural beauty, more especially when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our fathers’ piety[16] or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion.”  It was not in this sense that high mountains were a “passion” to Byron, nor yet to Wordsworth.  In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott wrote of popular poetry:  “Much of its peculiar charm is indeed, I believe, to be attributed solely to its locality. . . .  In some verses of that eccentric but admirable poet Coleridge[17] he talks of

  “’An old rude tale that suited well
    The ruins wild and hoary.’

“I think there are few who have not been in some degree touched with this local sympathy.  Tell a peasant an ordinary tale of robbery and murder, and perhaps you may fail to interest him; but, to excite his terrors, you assure him it happened on the very heath he usually crosses, or to a man whose family he has known, and you rarely meet such a mere image of humanity as remains entirely unmoved.  I suspect it is pretty much the same with myself.”