These lines hardly illustrate, I think, the particular form of Mr. Pitt’s criticism, for a quick succession of fine shades of feeling of this kind could never have been delineated in a painting, or indeed in a series of paintings, at all, while they are so given in the poem.  But the praise itself, if not its exact form, is amply deserved.  The singular depth of the romantic glow in this passage, and its equally singular simplicity,—­a simplicity which makes it intelligible to every one,—­are conspicuous to every reader.  It is not what is called classical poetry, for there is no severe outline,—­no sculptured completeness and repose,—­no satisfying wholeness of effect to the eye of the mind,—­no embodiment of a great action.  The poet gives us a breath, a ripple of alternating fear and hope in the heart of an old man, and that is all.  He catches an emotion that had its roots deep in the past, and that is striving onward towards something in the future;—­he traces the wistfulness and self-distrust with which age seeks to recover the feelings of youth,—­the delight with which it greets them when they come,—­the hesitation and diffidence with which it recalls them as they pass away, and questions the triumph it has just won,—­and he paints all this without subtlety, without complexity, but with a swiftness such as few poets ever surpassed.  Generally, however, Scott prefers action itself for his subject, to any feeling, however active in its bent.  The cases in which he makes a study of any mood of feeling, as he does of this harper’s feeling, are comparatively rare.  Deloraine’s night-ride to Melrose is a good deal more in Scott’s ordinary way, than this study of the old harper’s wistful mood.  But whatever his subject, his treatment of it is the same.  His lines are always strongly drawn; his handling is always simple; and his subject always romantic.  But though romantic, it is simple almost to bareness,—­one of the great causes both of his popularity, and of that deficiency in his poetry of which so many of his admirers become conscious when they compare him with other and richer poets.  Scott used to say that in poetry Byron “bet” him; and no doubt that in which chiefly as a poet he “bet” him, was in the variety, the richness, the lustre of his effects.  A certain ruggedness and bareness was of the essence of Scott’s idealism and romance.  It was so in relation to scenery.  He told Washington Irving that he loved the very nakedness of the Border country.  “It has something,” he said, “bold and stern and solitary about it.  When I have been for some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like ornamented garden-land, I begin to wish myself back again among my honest grey hills, and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die."[14] Now, the bareness which Scott so loved in his native scenery, there is in all his romantic elements of feeling.  It is while he is bold and stern, that he is at his