Through me no friend shall meet his doom;
Here, while I live, no foe finds room.
Then if thy Lords their purpose urge,
Take our defiance loud and high;
Our slogan is their lyke-wake dirge,
Our moat, the grave where they shall lie."


Ay, and though the minstrel says he is no love poet, and though,
indeed, he shines more in war than in lady's bower, is not this a
noble stanza on true love, and worthy of what old Malory writes in
his "Mort d'Arthur"? Because here Scott speaks for himself, and of
his own unhappy and immortal affection:-


"True love's the gift which God has given
To man alone beneath the Heaven.
It is not Fantasy's hot fire,
Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly;
It liveth not in fierce desire,
With dead desire it dock not die:
It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart and mind to mind,
In body and in soul can bind."


Truth and faith, courage and chivalry, a free life in the hills and
by the streams, a shrewd brain, an open heart, a kind word for
friend or foeman, these are what you learn from the "Lay," if you