Everything changed, changed utterly?
Alex Salmond is a complex man.
He has plenty of political allies, but very few true friends in politics.In public he's all hail fellow well met, in private he does not tolerate fools gladly.
His supporters say that given long enough he can charm and persuade anyone to come round to his point of view.
His critics say he's a bully, intolerant of dissent, who has ruthlessly used the machinery of government to get his way.
The man who stands down formally as First Minister tomorrow divides opinion.
Some love him. Some, frankly, loathe him.But even if they are in the latter camp, most people who have had dealings with Mr Salmond respect him.
From his early days as an MP, Mr Salmond always had great self-belief but he was in a party, the SNP, regarded as on the fringes of politics.
He had to fight many an internal party battle to turn the Nationalists into a modern political party, comfortable with a step-by-step approach to independence - what became known as gradualism.
Having observed him over the years, it is clear to me that fighting those battles hardened Mr Salmond.
His eventual triumph in the party, and recovering from setbacks along the way, gave him a steel that few party leaders possess.
Read: Key dates in Alex Salmond's career
And his perception, as a Nationalist, of the way which - in his view - the British state wielded power over Scotland informed his behaviour as First Minister.
In his view, the British state had ruthlessly used the power of government, and government influence over the wider public realm, in its interest.He was determined that he and his party would do the same in office as the Scottish government at Holyrood.
And they would do so with one goal in mind, achieving independence, once considered to rather eccentric, romantic, pipe dream.
With this in mind it was fascinating to sit down to interview Mr Salmond for the last time as First Minister.
You can see my interview with Alex Salmond tonight at 10.55 on ITV Border or online.
Speaking in Abbotsford House, ironically the home of that great Unionist and romantic small 'n' nationalist Sir Walter Scott, he reflected on his time in office.
His legacy to the south of Scotland included, he said, the Borders railway and saving the Crichton Campus in Dumfries.
More broadly, his argument was that, as he put it in his party conference speech, in Scotland after the referendum "everything changed, changed utterly".
That is a line which he borrowed from W.B. Yeats poem, Easter 1916, which expresses how Ireland changed after the rising which led to that country's eventual independence.
When I asked him about this Mr Salmond was keen to stress that the events in Scotland were very different.
Nationalism in Scotland had been entirely peaceful, he said. It has, of course. The referendum had been an empowering democratic event.But his wider point was that the referendum in Scotland had, like the Easter Rising in Ireland, changed Scotland profoundly and forever, through civic engagement, not after an armed rising and a civil war.
Salmond believes that sooner or later - and he is convinced it will be sooner - Scotland will take that step on to independence.
In Yeats' poem, there is a line which follows on from the one Salmond chose to quote. It is this:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
The man who hands over tomorrow to Nicola Sturgeon to carry forward the independence flame, does not think "a terrible beauty" has been born in Scotland.
But he does believe his legacy will be that what, in his view, a brilliant beauty - he did not use those precise words but those were his sentiments - has been born.
Scotland will, he is sure, be independent. And when we come to judge Alex Salmond we can only do so on that measure. It may be some time before we can made a definitive judgement.