But I do not
see, I confess, why one should be obliged to make the choice, or
why fame, besides playing that delightful REVEIL for which she is
so justly celebrated, should not blow out of her trumpet a few
notes of a different kind from those with which she has hitherto
contented herself.
It was well observed the other night by a beautiful speaker, whose
words went to the heart of every man who heard him, that, if there
had existed any law in this respect, Scott might not have sunk
beneath the mighty pressure on his brain, but might have lived to
add new creatures of his fancy to the crowd which swarm about you
in your summer walks, and gather round your winter evening hearths.
As I listened to his words, there came back, fresh upon me, that
touching scene in the great man's life, when he lay upon his couch,
surrounded by his family, and listened, for the last time, to the
rippling of the river he had so well loved, over its stony bed. I
pictured him to myself, faint, wan, dying, crushed both in mind and
body by his honourable struggle, and hovering round him the
phantoms of his own imagination--Waverley, Ravenswood, Jeanie
Deans, Rob Roy, Caleb Balderstone, Dominie Sampson--all the
familiar throng--with cavaliers, and Puritans, and Highland chiefs
innumerable overflowing the chamber, and fading away in the dim
distance beyond. I pictured them, fresh from traversing the world,
and hanging down their heads in shame and sorrow, that, from all
those lands into which they had carried gladness, instruction, and
delight for millions, they brought him not one friendly hand to
help to raise him from that sad, sad bed.
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