Edinburgh--"mine own romantic town "--from Blackford Hill;

"Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent:
As if to give his rapture vent,
The spur he to his charger lent,
And raised his bridle-hand,
And, making demi-volte in air,
Cried, 'Where's the coward that would not dare
To fight for such a land?'"

and the still more familiar opening of the sixth canto in the
"Lay"--"Breathes there the man," etc.:

"O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand?"

In such a mood geography becomes poetry and names are music.[15] Scott
said to Washington Irving that if he did not see the heather at least
once a year, he thought he would die.

Lockhart tells how the sound that he loved best of all sounds was in his
dying ears--the flow of the Tweed over its pebbles.

Significant, therefore, is Scott's treatment of landscape, and the
difference in this regard between himself and his great contemporaries.