I walked for an hour in Selkirk,
In the folds of a noonday dream;
And through it there ran for music
The murmur of Yarrow stream.
Murmur of Yarrow and Ettrick,
With their song and their old-world deed;
And then like a far-off organ
The monotone of the Tweed.
Then up through my dreaming rose visions,
And about me their spell was cast;
Till the present vanished around me,
And I was deep in the past.
I saw one stalwart figure,
With the stoop of one at the plough;
The tan of the winds of Ayrshire
Deep upon cheek and brow.
There was light on his swarthy forehead,
As he strode in thought along;
For his sensitive lips were moving
With the tremulous throbbing of song.
And just an arm's length from me,
Hot with the winds and dark,
I saw, but just for a moment,
The figure of Mungo Park.
One walked for a little beside me,
With a shepherd's crook in his hand;
On his lips were snatches of music
He had heard in fairyland.
Then right in front came onward,
Halting a little and lame;
The Merlin of the Border
With the magic none may claim.
The last of the mighty minstrels
That will ever be born to sing;
His cheek wore a touch of the colour
Which the winds of Ettrick bring.
I brushed his elbow in passing,
And my heart beat high at the thought
That I, in the streets of Selkirk,
Had touched Sir Walter Scott.
A change came over my vision;
And from out the past and its might,
Like the wind that sweeps the moorland,
When not a star is in sight,
Came upward an infinite sorrow
That human things will yield;
And through it there ran the wailing
For the dead on Flodden Field.
Mothers hushing their children
And ever weeping between;
And the long, deep sigh of maidens
Whose lovers would never be seen.
I saw old men at the harvest,
Bending over the sheaf;
Their long, thin fingers shaking,
And gray hairs hiding their grief.
But ever behind this picture,
One firm-set, terrible ring
Of faces and red-tipped lances
Around a fallen king.
All this was born of the murmur
Of Yarrow and Ettrick stream,
As I walked for an hour in Selkirk
In the folds of a noonday dream.