19. The Summer dawn's reflected hue, etc. Mr. Ruskin says (Modern Painters, iii. 278): "And thus Nature becomes dear to Scott in a threefold way: dear to him, first, as containing those remains or memories of the past, which he cannot find in cities, and giving hope of Praetorian mound or knight's grave in every green slope and shade of its desolate places; dear, secondly, in its moorland liberty, which has for him just as high a charm as the fenced garden had for the mediaeval;... and dear to him, finally, in that perfect beauty, denied alike in cities and in men, for which every modern heart had begun at last to thirst, and Scott's, in its freshness and power, of all men's most earnestly. "And in this love of beauty, observe that the love of colour is a leading element, his healthy mind being incapable of losing, under any modern false teaching, its joy in brilliancy of hue. ... In general, if he does not mean to say much about things, the one character which he will give is colour, using it with the most perfect mastery and faithfulness." After giving many illustrations of Scott's use of colour in his poetry, Ruskin quotes the present passage, which he says is "still more interesting, because it has no form in it at all except in one word (chalice), but wholly composes its imagery either of colour, or of that delicate half-believed life which we have seen to be so important an element in modern landscape." "Two more considerations," he adds, "are, however, suggested by the above passage. The first, that the love of natural history, excited by the continual attention now given to all wild landscape, heightens reciprocally the interest of that landscape, and becomes an important element in Scott's description, leading him to finish, down to the minutest speckling of breast, and slightest shade of attributed emotion, the portraiture of birds and animals; in strange opposition to Homer's slightly named 'sea-crows, who have care of the works of the sea,' and Dante's singing-birds, of undefined species. Compare carefully the 2d and 3d stanzas of Rokeby. "The second point I have to note is Scott's habit of drawing a slight moral from every scene,... and that this slight moral is almost always melancholy. Here he has stopped short without entirely expressing it: "The mountain-shadows.. ..................... lie Like future joys to Fancy's eye.' His completed thought would be, that these future joys, like the mountain-shadows, were never to be attained. It occurs fully uttered in many other places. He seems to have been constantly rebuking his own worldly pride and vanity, but never purposefully: 'The foam-globes on her eddies ride, Thick as the schemes of human pride That down life's current drive amain, As frail, as frothy, and as vain.'" Ruskin adds, among other illustrations, the reference to "foxglove and nightshade" in i. 218, 219 above.
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