Poetry > Lady of the lake

Canto 1.
THE CHASE.
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The broom’s tough roots his ladder made.
The hazel saplings lent their aid;
And thus an airy point he won,
Where, gleaming with the setting sun,
One burnish’d sheet of living gold,
Loch Katrine lay beneath him roll’d,1
In all her length far winding lay,
With promontory, creek, and bay,
And islands that, empurpled bright,
Floated amid the livelier light,
And mountains, that like giants stand,
To sentinel enchanted land.
High on the south, huge Benvenue 2
Down on the lake in masses threw
Crags, knolls, and mounds, confusedly hurl’d,
The fragments of an earlier world;
A wildering forest feather’d o’er
His ruin’d sides and summit hoar,3
which I have presumptuously attempted to describe in the pre¬
ceding stanzas, there was no mode of issuing out of the defile
called the Trosachs, excepting by a sort of ladder, composed of
the branches and roots of trees.
1 [Loch-Ketturin is the Celtic pronunciation. In his Notes to
The Fair Maid of Perth, the author has signified his belief that
the lake was named after the Catterins, or wild robbers, who
haunted its shores.]
2 [Benvenue—is literally the little mountain—/, e. as contrasted
with Benledi and Benlomond.]
5 [MS.—“His ruined sides and fragments hoar
While on the north to middle air.”]