Poetry > Lady of the lake

Canto 1.
THE CHASE.
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And mingled with the pine-trees blue
On the bold cliffs of Benvenue.
Fresh vigour with the hope return’d,1
With flying foot the heath he spum’d,
Held westward with unwearied race,
And left behind the panting chase.
VI.
’Twere long to tell what steeds gave o’er,
As swept the hunt through Cambus-more ; *
What reins were tighten’d in despair,
When rose Benledi’s ridge in air ;3
Who flagg’d upon Bochastle’s heath,
Who shunn’d to stem the flooded Teith—4
double echo, of uncommon distinctness. Upon pronouncing, with
a firm voice, a line of ten syllables, it is returned, first from the op¬
posite side of the lake ; and when that is finished, it is repeated
with equal distinctness from the wood on the east. The day
must be perfectly calm, and the lake as smooth as glass, for
otherwise no human voice can be returned from a distance of at
least a quarter of a mile.”—Graham’s Sketches of Perthshire, 2d
edit. p. 182, &c.]
1 [MS.—‘‘ Fresh vigour with the thought return’d,
With flying hoof the heath he spurn’d.”]
3 [Cambus-more, within about two miles of Callender, on the
wooded banks of the Keltic, a tributary of the Teith, is the seat
of a family of the name of Buchanan, whom the poet frequently
visited in his younger days.]
3 [Benledi is a magnificent mountain, 3009 feet in height, which
bounds the horizon on the north-west from Callender. The name,
according to Celtic etymologists, signifies the Mountain of God.']
4 [Two mountain streams—the one flowing from Loch Veil, by