"I can see as many castles in the clouds as any man," he testified.[11] A recent writer has said that Scott had more than any other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic, and adds that his was that true romance which "lies not upon the outside of life, but absolutely in the centre of it."[12] The situations and the very objects that he described have the power of stirring the romantic spirit in his readers because he was alive to the glamour surrounding anything which has for generations been connected with human thoughts and emotions.

The subjectivity which was so prominent an element in the romanticism of Shelley, Keats, and Byron, does not appear in Scott's work.

Nor was his sense of the mystery of things so subtle as that of Coleridge.

But Scott, rather than Coleridge, was the interpreter to his age of the romantic spirit, for the ordinary person likes his wonders so tangible that he may know definitely the point at which they impinge upon his consciousness.

In Scott's work the point of contact is made clear: the author brings his atmosphere not from another world but from the past, and with all its strangeness it has no unearthly quality.