The poetical works of Sir Walter Scott, with memoir of the author.

CANTO IV.] THE LORD OF THE ISLES. 147
The Chief, relentless in his wrath,
With blazing heath blockades the path;
In dense and stifling volumes roll'd,
The vapour fill'd the cavern'd hold!
The warrior-threat, the infant's plain,
The mother's screams, were heard in vain;
The vengeful Chief maintains his fires,
Till in the vault 1 a tribe expires!
The bones which strew that cavern's gloom,
Too well attest their dismal doom.
x.
Merrily, merrily goes the bark 2
On a breeze from the northward fiee,
So shoots through the morning sky the lark
Or the swan through the summer sea.
The shores of Mull on the eastward lay,
And Ulva dark and Colonsay,
1 [MS.-" Till in their smoke," &c.]
2 [" And so so also'merrily, merrily goes the bard,' in a succession of merrinment, which, like Dogberry's tediousness, he
finds it in his heart to bestow wholly and entirely on us,
through page after page, or wave after wave of his voyage.
We could almost be tempted to believe that he was on his
return from Skye when he wrote this portion of his poem;from Skye, the depository of the' mighty cup of royal Somerled,' as well as of'Rorie More's' comparatively modern'horn'-and that, as he says himself of a minstrel who celebrated the hospitalities of Dunvegan-castle in that island,'it
is pretty plain, that when this tribute of poetical praise was
bestowed, the horn of Rorie More had not been inactive.' "jlMonthly Review. See Appendix, Note E.]