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

CANTO VI.] HAROLD THE DAUNTLESS.

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And that, as one who struggled long in dying;
One bony hand held knife, as if to smite;
One bent on fleshless knees, as mercy crying;
One lay across the door, as kill'd in act of flying.'
The stern Dane smiled this charnel-house to
see,For his chafed thought return'd to Metelill;And " Well," he said, " hath woman's perfidy,
Empty as air, as water volatile,
Been here avenged.-The origin of ill
Through woman rose, the Christian doctrine
saith;
Nor deem I, Gunnar, that thy minstrel skill
Can show example where a woman's breath
Hath made a true-love vow, and, tempted, kept
her faith."
VII.
The minstrel-boy half smiled, half sigh'd,
And his half-filling eyes he dried,
And said, " The theme I should but wrong,
1 [" In an invention like this we are hardly to look for probabilities, but all these preparations and ornaments are not
quite consistent with the state of society two hundred years
before the Danish Invasion, as far as we know any thing of
it. In these matters, however, the author is never very scrupulous, and has too little regarded propriety in the minor
circumstances; thus Harold is clad in a kind of armour not
worn until some hundred years after the era of the poem,
and many of the scenes described, like that last quoted,