Ossian Collection > Aspects of poetry

XI.] THE THREE YARROWS. ^'^^
' Nor have these eyes by greener hills
Been soothed, in all my wanderings ;
And, through her depths, Saint Mary's Lake
Is visibly delighted ;
For not a feature of those hills
Is in the mirror slighted.'
And ' a blue sky bends o'er Yarrow Vale,' save where it
is flecked by ' pearly whiteness ' of a fair September
morning. Everything that meets his eye is beautiful
and soothing. But the braes, though beautiful, look
so solitary and desolate, and the solitariness of the
present answers too well to the sadness of the past.
Summing up all the sorrows of innumerable songs in
one question, he exclaims, —
' Where was it that the famous Flower
Of Yarrow Vale lay bleeding ? '
And here, if we might pause on details of fact, we might
say that Wordsworth fell into an inaccuracy ; for Mary
Scott of Dryhope, the real 'Flower of Yarrow,' never
did lie bleeding on Yarrow, but became the wife of Wat
of Harden, and the mother of a wide-branching race.
Yet Wordsworth speaks oihis bed, evidently confounding
the lady ' Flower of Yarrow ' with that ' slaughtered
youth' for whom so many ballads had sung lament.
This slight divergence from fact, however, no way mars
the truth of feeling, which makes the poet long to pierce
into the dumb past, and know something of the pathetic
histories that have immortalised these braes. But,