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You remember, I dare say, how Wordsworth, in his poem of 
Yarrow Unvisited, asks contemptuously— 
What’s Yarrow, but a river bare, 
That glides the dark hills under? 
There are a thousand such elsewhere, 
As worthy of our wonder. 
and yet how, in after years, when visiting the scene, he was compelled 
to confess there was something he had not found elsewhere— 
something the memory of which he would fain keep with him— 
To dwell with me, to heighten joy, 
And cheer my mind in sorrow. 
And so with the whole district. There is a nameless charm about 
‘it. It is this which has made it 
Meet nurse for a poetic child ; 
and to have given birth to Scott and Burns, and fed their youthful 
fancies, is alone a distinction such as no other district in the world 
can claim. How entirely this was the case with Scott we know; 
and how of their yearly rambles in Liddesdale Mr. Shortreed, his 
companion, said: ‘‘ He was making himself all the time, and didn’t 
know till years had passed, perhaps.” And while from these 
Border scenes he thus drew in his inspiration, he poured over 
them in return, with all the power of genius, a flood of interest 
which will never die—which has made these old memories the 
possession, not of a district, but of the world. 
But I must illustrate this pathetic side of the old Ballads, 
springing, as it does, from the sadness of the past history of the 
district, linking every object in Nature with some tale of sorrow, 
by one or two examples. Where could you find painted a more 
touching picture of sorrow and lonely mourning than in the lament 
of the widow of one of the old rievers, William Cokeburne, who 
had been executed before the gate of his own tower, near S. Mary’s 
Loch, by James IV. or V._ I dare say you know it— 
I sewed his sheet, making my mane, 
I watched the corpse myself alane ; 
I watched his body night and day, 
No living creature came that way. 
