"From this period," he says, "I date
my love of mountainous countries. I can never forget the effect, years
afterwards, in England, of the only thing I had long seen, even in
miniature, of a mountain, in the Malvern Hills. After I returned to
Cheltenham I used to watch them every afternoon, at sunset, with a
sensation which I cannot describe." Elsewhere, in _The Island_ he returns,
amid allusions to the Alps and Apennines, to the friends of his youth:--
The infant rapture still survived the boy,
And Lach-na-gair with Ida look'd o'er Troy,
Mixed Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount,
And Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount.
The poet, owing to his physical defect, was not a great climber, and we
are informed, on the authority of his nurse, that he never even scaled the
easily attainable summit of the "steep frowning" hill of which he has made
such effective use. But the impression of it from a distance was none the
less genuine. In the midst of a generous address, in _Don Juan_, to
Jeffrey, he again refers to the same associations with the country of his
early training:--
But I am half a Scot by birth, and bred
A whole one; and my heart flies to my head
As "Auld Lang Syne" brings Scotland, one and all--
Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills and clear streams,
The Dee, the Don, Balgounie's brig's black wall--
All my boy feelings, all my gentler dreams
Of what I then dreamt, clothed in their own pall,
Like Banquo's offspring.
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