Loch Katrine.
I.
How calm and fair, how very fair thy face1
That August evening when I saw thee first
!2
Thy glorious beauty like a vision burst3
Full on me, and I lingered for a space,4
Breathing the soft enchantment of the place,5
To feel myself in fairyland, immersed6
In lore and legend of an age that nursed7
The finer fortunes of a fairy race.8
Ben A’an and Ben Venue had held me bound9
In loving reverence and in awe made sweet10
By all the beauty of the nearer ground,11
The Trossachs, rising lovely from my feet ;12
But that first gleam of thee, that sudden sight,13
Filled me and overwhelmed me with delight.14
II.
Wearing thy poet’s praises as a crown,15
Thy beauty crowns him with its own excess,16
And if he gave thee glory, thou no less17
Hast given him profusely of thine own ;18
Thy fame and his, inseparably grown,19
And thine and Ellen’s loveliness, express20
One immortality, one loveliness,21
Whereof we see the sum in thee alone.22
Loch of the lovely isle and silver strand,23
In whose bright waves new beauty ever breaks,24
In whose deep heart, where cloud and sky expand,25
Perpetual joy, perpetual music wakes,26
Fairer than all thy sisters in the land,27
Thou art thyself the Lady of the Lakes !28