Scott's romance is like his native
scenery,--bold, bare and rugged, with a swift deep stream of strong
pure feeling running through it. There is plenty of colour in his
pictures, as there is on the Scotch hills when the heather is out. And
so too there is plenty of intensity in his romantic situations; but it
is the intensity of simple, natural, unsophisticated, hardy, and manly
characters. But as for subtleties and fine shades of feeling in his
poems, or anything like the manifold harmonies of the richer arts,
they are not to be found, or, if such complicated shading is to be
found--and it is perhaps attempted in some faint measure in _The
Bridal of Triermain,_ the poem in which Scott tried to pass himself
off for Erskine,--it is only at the expense of the higher qualities of
his romantic poetry, that even in this small measure it is supplied.
Again, there is no rich music in his verse. It is its rapid onset, its
hurrying strength, which so fixes it in the mind.
It was not till 1808, three years after the publication of _The Lay_, that
_Marmion_, Scott's greatest poem, was published.
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