XIII. Onward, amid the copse 'gan peep Affording scarce such breadth of brim,1 XIV. And now, to issue from the glen, 1 [MS." Affording scarce such breadth of flood, 2 [MS. "Emerging dry-shod from the wood."] Until the present road was made through the romantic pass The broom's tough roots his ladder made, High on the south, huge Benvenue" Down on the lake in masses threw which I have presumptuously attempted to describe in the preceding stanzas, there was no mode of issuing out of the defile called the Trosachs, excepting by a sort of ladder, composed of the branches and roots of trees. 1 [Loch-Ketturin is the Celtic pronunciation. In his Notes to The Fair Maid of Perth, the author has signified his belief that the lake was named after the Catterins, or wild robbers, who haunted its shores.] 2 [Benvenue-is literally the little mountain-i. e. as contrasted with Benledi and Benlomond.] 3 [MS.-"His ruined sides and fragments hoar While on the north to middle air."] While on the north, through middle air, XV. From the steep promontory gazed3 And, "What a scene were here,” he cried, In that soft vale, a lady's bower; Chide, on the lake, the lingering morn! How sweet, at eve, the lover's lute Chime, when the groves were still and mute! 1 [According to Graham, Ben-an, or Bennan, is a mere diminutive of Ben-Mountain.] 2 [Perhaps the art of landscape-painting in poetry, has never been displayed in higher perfection than in these stanzas, to which rigid criticism might possibly object that the picture is somewhat too minute, and that the contemplation of it detains the traveller somewhat too long from the main purpose of his pilgrimage, but which it would be an act of the greatest injustice to break into fragments, and present by piecemeal. Not so the magnificent scene which bursts upon the bewildered hunter as he emerges at length from the dell, and commands at one view the beautifu expanse of Loch Katrine."-Critical Review, August 1820.] 3 [MS.-"From the high promontory gazed The stranger, awe-struck and amazed."] And, when the midnight moon should lave How solemn on the ear would come XVI. "Blithe were it then to wander here! 1 [MS.-"To hospitable feast and hall."] My chamber for the night must be."] To meet with Highland plunderers here, May call some straggler of the train; XVII. But scarce again his horn he wound,2 1 The clans who inhabited the romantic regions in the neighbourhood of Loch Katrine, were, even until a late period, much addicted to predatory excursions upon their Lowland neighbours. "In former times, those parts of this district, which are situated beyond the Grampian range, were rendered almost inaccessible by strong barriers of rocks, and mountains, and lakes. It was a border country, and though on the very verge of the low country, it was almost totally sequestered from the world, and, as it were, insulated with respect to society. 'Tis well known that in the Highlands, it was, in former times, accounted not only lawful, but honourable, among hostile tribes, to commit depredations on one another; and these habits of the age were perhaps strengthened in this district by the circumstances which have been mentioned. It bordered on a country, the inhabitants of which, while they were richer, were less warlike than they, and widely differenced by language and manners.”—GRAHAM's Sketches of Scenery in Perthshire, Edin. 1806, p. 97. The reader will therefore be pleased to remember, that the scene of this poem is laid in a time, "When tooming faulds, or sweeping of a glen, [MS.-" The bugle shrill again he wound, And lo forth starting at the sound."] |