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“When fruitful Clydesdale’s apple-bowers
Are mellowing in the noon;
When sighs round Pembroke’s ruin’d towers
The sultry breath of June;
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“When Clyde, despite his sheltering wood,
Must leave his channel dry;
And vainly o’er the limpid flood
The angler guides his fly;
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“If, chance, by Bothwell’s lovely braes
A wanderer thou hast been,
Or hid thee from the summer’s blaze
In Blantyre’s bowers of green
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“Full where the copse wood opens wild
Thy pilgrim step hath staid
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| 306 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
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Where Bothwell’s towers in ruin piled
O’erlook the verdant glade;
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“And many a tale of love and fear
Hath mingled with the scene—
Of Bothwell’s banks that bloom’d so dear
And Bothwell’s bonny Jean.
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“O, if with rugged minstrel lays
Unsated be thy ear,
And thou of deeds of other days
Another tale wilt hear,
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“Then all beneath the spreading beech
Flung careless on life lea,
The Gothic muse the tale shall teach
Of Bothwell’s sisters three.
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“Wight Wallace stood on
Deckmont head,
He blew his bugle round,
Till the wild bull in Cadyow wood
Has started at the sound.
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“St George’s cross, o’er Bothwell hung,
Was waving far and wide,
And from the lofty turret flung
Its crimson blaze on Clyde;
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“And rising at the bugle blast
That mark’d the Scottish foe,
Old England’s yeomen muster’d fast,
And bent the Norman bow.
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“Tall in the midst Sir Aylmer
rose,
Proud Pembroke’s Earl was he
While”— . . . . . .
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