22 THE PASTORAL AND KOMANTIC. 



that surrounds her, and the skill of the painter who de- 

 vised the scene. But there is no poetry in the simple 

 feeling of admiration, and what we merely admire sel- 

 dom affects the heart. A mother sitting upon a solitary 

 shore, with a group of young children clinging about her, 

 looking for an approaching sail, is a scene that excites no 

 admiration, but keenly awakens our sympathies, and is 

 poetical in the highest degree. From humble life, or 

 from greatness reduced to misfortune, the painter and the 

 poet must select all those images and incidents that will 

 deeply affect the soul. 



In an old edition of the " Lady of the Lake," a poem 

 full of romantic scenes, the frontispiece represents the 

 heroine of the story alone in a skiff, near the shore of the 

 lake. The royal hunter, having been separated from his 

 companions, and being in a wild and lonely situation, by 

 the side of Loch Katrine, sounds his bugle. This alarms 

 the maiden, who quickly, on perceiving the hunter, pushes 

 her light shallop from the shore. Ellen was a chieftain's 

 daughter, and being alone in a skiff, near the margin of a 

 solitary lake in the forest, she becomes an object of in- 

 tensely romantic interest ; and her youth and her beauty, 

 her loneliness and her danger, yield a deeply picturesque 

 and poetical character to the scene. Neither her beauty 

 nor her rank would so deeply affect us, if there were 

 nothing in her situation to awaken our sympathy and 

 arouse our apprehension of her dangers. But when she 

 is seen with hasty oar in the act of pushing her shallop 

 into deeper water, to avoid the stranger huntsman, she 

 becomes a romantic object in proportion to her beauty and 

 her perils. 



It is the affecting character of written or painted scenes 

 of humble life that awakens the interest which has al- 

 ways been felt in the narrative of the " Deserted Village," 

 that perfect example of the pastoral elegy. Whether 



