This eBook was produced by Les Bowler.
SOME POEMS BY SIR WALTER SCOTT
Contents.
PAGES | |
Introduction by Henry Morley | ix–xii |
The Vision of Don Roderick | 133–167 |
The Field of Waterloo | 168–183 |
The Dance of Death | 184–188 |
Romance of Dunois | 189–190 |
The Troubadour | 190–191 |
Pibroch of Donald Dhu | 191–192 |
“Quid dignum memorare tuis,Hispania, terris,
Vox humana valet!”—Claudian.
p. ixIntroduction.
Since there is room in this volume for more verses thanColonel Hay’s [9], I have added to them a few poems by SirWalter Scott; the first written in 1811 at the time of thestruggle with Napoleon in the Peninsula, the second in 1815,after Waterloo. Thus there is over all this volume a thinhaze of battle through which we see only the finer feelings andthe nobler hopes of man. The day is to come when war shallbe no more, but wars have been and may again be necessary tobring on that day; p.xand it is of such war, not untinged with the light ofheaven, that we have passing shadows in this little book.
“The Vision of Don Roderick; a Poem, by Walter Scott,Esq.,” was printed at Edinburgh by James Ballantyne &Co. in 1811. They are the present representatives of thatfirm by whom it is here reprinted. It was originallyinscribed “to John Whitmore, Esq., and to the Committee ofSubscribers for relief of the Portuguese Sufferers, in which hepresides,” as a “poem composed for the benefit of theFund under their management.”
The Legend of Don Roderick will be given in the next volume ofour “Companion Poets,” for Robert Southey foundedupon it a Romantic Tale in Verse, which is one of the best talesof the kind in the English language. Southey’s taleof Roderick himself was written at the same time when WalterSavage Landor was writing a play upon the subject, and Scott was,in the piece here reprinted, making it the starting-point of avision of the war in the Peninsula. The fatal palace of DonRoderick may have been a fable connected with the ruins of aRoman amphitheatre. The fable, as tran