Scott liked to feel solid ground of history, or at least of legend, under his feet.  He connected his wildest tales, like “Glenfinlas” and “The Eve of St. John,” with definite names and places.  This Antaeus of romance lost strength, as soon as he was lifted above the earth.  With Coleridge it was just the contrary.  The moment his moonlit, vapory enchantments touched ground, the contact “precipitated the whole solution.”  In 1813 Scott had printed “The Bridal of Triermain” anonymously, with a preface designed to mislead the public; having contrived, by way of a joke, to fasten the authorship of the piece upon Erskine.  This poem is as pure fantasy as Tennyson’s “Day Dream,” and tells the story of a knight who, in obedience to a vision and the instructions of an ancient sage “sprung from Druid sires,” enters an enchanted castle and frees the Princess Gyneth, a natural daughter of King Arthur, from the spell that has bound her for five hundred years.  But true to his instinct, the poet lays his scene not in vacuo, but near his own beloved borderland.  He found, in Burns’ “Antiquities of Westmoreland and Cumberland” mention of a line of Rolands de Vaux, lords of Triermain, a fief of the barony of Gilsland; and this furnished him a name for his hero.  He found in Hutchinson’s “Excursion to the Lakes” the description of a cluster of rocks in the Vale of St. John’s, which looked, at a distance, like a Gothic castle, this supplied him with a hint for the whole adventure.  Meanwhile Coleridge had been living in the Lake Country.  The wheels of his “Christabel” had got hopelessly mired, and he now borrowed a horse from Sir Walter and hitched it to his own wagon.  He took over Sir Roland de Vaux of Triermain and made him the putative father of his mysterious Geraldine, although, in compliance with Scott’s romance, the embassy that goes over the mountains to Sir Roland’s castle can find no trace of it.  In Part I. Sir Leoline’s own castle stood nowhere in particular.  In Part II. it is transferred to Cumberland, a mistake in art almost as grave as if the Ancient Mariner had brought his ship to port at Liverpool.

Wordsworth visited the “great Minstrel of the Border” at Abbotsford in 1831, shortly before Scott set out for Naples, and the two poets went in company to the ruins of Newark Castle.  It is characteristic that in “Yarrow Revisited,” which commemorates the incident, the Bard of Rydal should think it necessary to offer an apology for his distinguished host’s habit of romanticising nature—­that nature which Wordsworth, romantic neither in temper nor choice of subject, treated after so different a fashion.

  “Nor deem that localised Romance
    Plays false with our affections;
  Unsanctifies our tears—­made sport
    For fanciful dejections: 
  Ah no! the visions of the past
    Sustain the heart in feeling
  Life as she is—­our changeful Life,
    With friends and kindred dealing.”