Life of Sir Walter ScottC. Scribner, 1852 - 298 pages |
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Page 165 - IF thou would'st view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moon-light; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild, but to flout, the ruins gray. When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruined central tower; When buttress and buttress, alternately, Seem framed of ebon and ivory; When silver edges the imagery, And the scrolls that teach thee...
Page 133 - I gazed about me for a time with mute surprise, I may almost say, with disappointment. I beheld a mere succession of grey waving hills, line beyond line, as far as my eye could reach, monotonous in their aspect, and so destitute of trees, that one could almost see a stout fly walking along their profile ; and the far-famed Tweed appeared a naked stream, flowing between bare hills, without a tree or thicket on its banks...
Page 182 - Grey, which carried him nimbly and stoutly, although his feet almost touched the ground as he sat, was the adjutant. But the most picturesque figure was the illustrious inventor of the safety-lamp. He had come for his favourite sport of angling, and had been practising it successfully with...
Page 133 - but to my eye these grey hills and all this wild border country have beauties peculiar to themselves. I like the very nakedness of the land ; it has something 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 own honest grey hills ; and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die!
Page 148 - Sometimes he folded letter-covers— sometimes he twisted paper into matches, performing both tasks with great mechanical expertness and nicety; and when there was no loose paper fit to be so dealt with, he snapped his fingers, and the noble Maida aroused himself from his lair on the hearth-rug, and laid his head across his master's knees, to be caressed and fondled. The room had no space for pictures except one, an original portrait of Claverhouse, which hung over the chimney-piece, with a Highland...
Page 130 - In a little while the lord of the castle himself made his appearance. I knew him at once by the descriptions I had read and heard, and the likenesses that had been published of him.
Page 240 - Charlotte — my thirty years' companion. There is the same symmetry of form, though those limbs are rigid which were once so gracefully elastic —but that yellow mask, with pinched features, which seems to mock life rather than emulate it, can it be the face that was once so full of lively expression ? I will not look on it again. Anne thinks her little changed, because the latest idea she had formed of her mother is as she appeared under circumstances of extreme pain.
Page 169 - Scott amused himself with the peculiarities of another of his dogs, a little shamefaced terrier, with large glassy eyes, one of the most sensitive little bodies to insult and indignity in the world. * If ever he whipped him...
Page 185 - I ever heard either on any other occasion whatsoever. Scott in his romantic narratives touched a deeper chord of feeling than usual, when he had such a listener as Davy; and Davy, when induced to open his views upon any question of scientific interest in Scott's presence, did so with a degree of clear energetic eloquence, and with a flow of imagery and illustration, of which neither his habitual tone of table-talk (least of all in London), nor any of his prose writings (except, indeed, the posthumous...
Page 209 - The weather was beautiful, and the edifice, and its appurtenances, were all but complete; and day after day, so long as she could remain, her host had always some new plan of gaiety. One day there was fishing on the Cauldshields Loch, and a dinner on the heathy bank.