My companion asked me laughingly
why I did so. "Why?" I said. "From natural piety, of course! I know
every detail here as well as if I had lived here, and I have walked
in thought a hundred times with the poet, to and fro in the
laurelled walks of the garden, up the green shoulder of Nab Scar,
and sat in the little parlour, while the fire leapt on the hearth,
and heard him 'booing' his verses, to be copied by some friendly
hand."
I thrill to see the stately rooms of Abbotsford, with all their
sham feudal decorations, the little staircase by which Scott stole
away to his solitary work, the folded clothes, the shapeless hat,
the ugly shoes, laid away in the glass case; the plantations where
he walked with his shrewd bailiff, the place where he stopped so
often on the shoulder of the slope, to look at the Eildon Hills,
the rooms where he sat, a broken and bereaved man, yet with so
gallant a spirit, to wrestle with sorrow and adversity. I wept, I
am not ashamed to say, at Abbotsford, at the sight of the stately
Tweed rolling his silvery flood past lawns and shrubberies, to
think of that kindly, brave, and honourable heart, and his
passionate love of all the goodly and cheerful joys of life and
earth.
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