And Marathon looks on the sea.”
The same, too, who, alluding to the great sea-fight, gives the scenery also:—
“A king sat on the rocky brow
That looks o’er sea-born Salamis,
And ships in thousands lay below,
And men in nations all were his.
He counted them at break of day,
And when the sun set where were they?”
Perhaps of all modern poets, Walter Scott is the one who has looked on the earth most habitually as seen through the coloring with which historic events and great historic names have invested it. It is not only that he has in his romantic epics described the actual features of the fields of Flodden and of Bannockburn with a minuteness foreign to the genius of the ancients. He has done this. But, besides, wherever he set his foot in his native land—not in a battle-field alone, but by ruined keep or solitary moor, or rocky sea-shore or western island—there rose before his eye the human forms either of the heroic past or of the lowlier peasantry, and if no actual record hung among them, his imagination supplied the want, and peopled the places with characters appropriate, which shall remain interwoven with the very features of the scenes while the name of Scotland lasts.