I observed him noting down even the peculiar little wild flowers and herbs that accidentally grew round and on the side of a bold crag near his intended cave of Guy Denzil; and could not help saying that as he was not to be upon oath in his work, daisies, violets, and primroses would be as poetical as any of the humble plants he was examining. I laughed, in short, at his scrupulousness; but I understood him when he replied, 'that in nature herself no two scenes were ever exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes would possess the same variety in his descriptions and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas whoever trusted to imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed, and contracted to a few favourite images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later produce that very monotony and bareness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth.
The 'old church of the right sort' was found on the other side of Rokeby Park. We reached it from Barnard Castle by crossing the high Abbey Bridge, beneath which the Tees flows in a narrow, rippling, foaming lane of water, flanked on either side by trees of rich foliage whose bright green branches wave to each other continually across the stream in a sort of friendly salute. The old grey Abbey of Egliston is pleasantly situated on rising ground near where the Tees is joined by the rivulet known as Thorsgill.
Yet scald or kemper erred, I ween,
Who gave that soft and quiet scene,
With all its varied light and shade,
And every little sunny glade,
And the blithe brook that strolls along
Its pebbled bed with summer song,
To the grim God of blood and scar,
The grisly King of Northern War.
The abbey was founded in the twelfth century and dedicated to St. Mary and St. John the Baptist. It was once a beautiful cruciform building in the Early English style, but has been allowed to fall into decay and now only parts of the walls of the choir and nave remain.
The reverend pile lay wild and waste,
Profound, dishonoured, and defaced.
Through storied lattices no more,
In softened light the sunbeams pour,
Gilding the Gothic sculpture rich
Of shrine and ornament and niche.
This was the scene which Scott chose for the culminating tragedy of the poem.
There are many other places in the neighbourhood to which the poet refers. There is 'Raby's battered tower,' a large castle which boasts the honour of twice entertaining Charles I. There is the Balder, 'a sweet brooklet's silver line,' which flows into the Tees a few miles above Barnard Castle, and farther to the northwest, where the three counties of York, Durham, and Westmoreland meet, is the place
Where Tees in tumult leaves his source
Thundering o'er Cauldron and High-Force.
These two cataracts are most impressive when rainstorms have swelled the stream to its full capacity. Just outside the park of Rokeby is a charming spot where the Greta meets the Tees,—