And teach his infants in the use
Of earliest speech to falter Bruce.”
There is nothing, to my mind, in any poem more dramatic than this unexpected prayer of the abbott; and the reader does not wonder that
“O’er the astonished throng
Was silence, awful, deep and long.”
The scene of the poem now changes to the stormy island of Skye, where Sir Walter pauses to give one of his beautiful descriptions in the fourteenth and fifteenth divisions of canto third.
The fourth canto takes the king en route past the island of Staffa, with its Fingal’s Cave, and Iona, with its sainted shrine—the cradle of Christianity in Britain, now in ruin. His description of Staffa is one of the most beautiful in English verse:
“Where, as to shame the temples decked
By skill of earthly architect,
Nature herself, it seemed would raise