of St. John," with definite names and places. This Antaeus of romance
lost strength, as soon as he was lifted above the earth. With Coleridge
it was just the contrary. The moment his moonlit, vapory enchantments
touched ground, the contact "precipitated the whole solution." In 1813
Scott had printed "The Bridal of Triermain" anonymously, with a preface
designed to mislead the public; having contrived, by way of a joke, to
fasten the authorship of the piece upon Erskine. This poem is as pure
fantasy as Tennyson's "Day Dream," and tells the story of a knight who,
in obedience to a vision and the instructions of an ancient sage "sprung
from Druid sires," enters an enchanted castle and frees the Princess
Gyneth, a natural daughter of King Arthur, from the spell that has bound
her for five hundred years. But true to his instinct, the poet lays his
scene not _in vacuo_, but near his own beloved borderland. He found, in
Burns' "Antiquities of Westmoreland and Cumberland" mention of a line of
Rolands de Vaux, lords of Triermain, a fief of the barony of Gilsland;
and this furnished him a name for his hero. He found in Hutchinson's
"Excursion to the Lakes" the description of a cluster of rocks in the
Vale of St. John's, which looked, at a distance, like a Gothic castle,
this supplied him with a hint for the whole adventure. Meanwhile
Coleridge had been living in the Lake Country. The wheels of his
"Christabel" had got hopelessly mired, and he now borrowed a horse from
Sir Walter and hitched it to his own wagon. He took over Sir Roland de
Vaux of Triermain and made him the putative father of his mysterious
Geraldine, although, in compliance with Scott's romance, the embassy that
goes over the mountains to Sir Roland's castle can find no trace of it.
In Part I. Sir Leoline's own castle stood nowhere in particular. In Part
II. it is transferred to Cumberland, a mistake in art almost as grave as
if the Ancient Mariner had brought his ship to port at Liverpool.

Wordsworth visited the "great Minstrel of the Border" at Abbotsford in