description of the chase in "Hartleap Well" and the opening passage of
"The Lady of the Lake":

"The stag at eve had drunk his fill.
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill," etc.[22]

Scott was a keen sportsman, and his sympathy was with the hunter.[23]
Wordsworth's, of course, was with the quarry. The knight in his
poem--who bears not unsuggestively the name of "Sir Walter"--has
outstripped all his companions, like Fitz James, and is the only one in
at the death. To commemorate his triumph he frames a basin for the
spring whose waters were stirred by his victim's dying breath; he plants
three stone pillars to mark the creature's hoof-prints in its marvellous
leap from the mountain to the springside; and he builds a pleasure house
and an arbour where he comes with his paramour to make merry in the
summer days. But Nature sets her seal of condemnation upon the cruelty
and vainglory of man. "The spot is curst"; no flowers or grass will grow
there; no beast will drink of the fountain. Part I. tells the story
without enthusiasm but without comment. Part II. draws the lesson

"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."

The song of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" derives a pensive sorrow from
"old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago." But to Scott the
battle is not far off, but a vivid and present reality. When he visited
the Trosachs glen, his thought plainly was, "What a place for a fight!"
And when James looks down on Loch Katrine his first reflection is, "What
a scene were here . . .