Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!”
- Date
- 1805
Meaning of “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,…”
Scott’s minstrel treats attachment to one’s homeland as a deep part of identity and imagines emotional estrangement from home as a profound loss of belonging.
Where does it come from?
The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto VI, stanza I; reviewed against the 1805 first-edition scan, leaf 170. The patriotic homeland passage is voiced by Scott's minstrel/narrator at the opening of Canto VI and continues into the warning about dying 'unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.' It is Romantic literary rhetoric rather than a rule about nationality or civic loyalty.