They had almost been forgotten, and yet they
are poems which stir the heart with their plaintive notes,
telling as they do--
"Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago;
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again!"*
*Wordsworth.
Bishop Percy, like a knight of old, laid his lance in rest and
tilted against the prickly briar hedge that had grown up around
the Sleeping Beauty, Romance. But he could not win through and
wake the princess. And although Burns and Wordsworth, Coleridge
and Southey, all knowing it or not, fought on his side, it was
left for another knight to break through the hedge and make us
free of the Enchanted Land. And that knight's name was Walter--
Sir Walter, too--for, like a true knight, he won his title in the
service of his lady.
Little Walter's father was a kindly Scots lawyer, but he came of
a good old Border family, "A hardy race who never shrunk from
war.
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