scribe it. That, for a good many years, was often done, but naturally inspired any other feeling than delight or admiration. But the simple question is, Do the poems of Ossian delight greatly and widely? We think they do. Nor can we believe that they would not still delight such a poet as Mr Wordsworth. What dreariness overspreads them all! What a melancholy spirit shrouds all his heroes, passing before us on the cloud, after all their battles have been fought, and their tombs raised on the hill! The very picture of the old blind Hero-bard himself, often attended by the weeping virgins whom war has made desolate, is always touching, often sublime. The desert is peopled with lamenting mortals, and the mists that wrap them with ghosts, whose remembrances of this life are all dirge and elegy. True, that the images are few and endlessly reiterated; but that, we suspect, is the case with all poetry composed not in a philosophic age. The great and constant appearances of nature suffice, in their simplicity, for all its purposes. The poet seeks not to vary their character, and his hearers are willing to be charmed over and over again by the same strains. We believe that the poetry of Ossian would be destroyed by any greater distinctness or variety of imagery. And if, indeed, Fingal lived and Ossian sung, we must believe that the old bard was blind; and we suspect that in such an age, such a man would, in his blindness, think dreamily indeed of the torrents, and lakes, and heaths, and clouds, and mountains, moons and stars, which he had leapt, swam, walked, climbed, and gazed on in the days of his rejoicing youth. Then has he no tenderness-no pathos-no beauty? Alas for thousands of hearts and souls if it be even so! For then are many of their holiest dreams worthless all, and divinest melancholy a mere complaint of the understanding, which a bit of philosophical criticism will purge away, as the leech's phial does a disease of the blood. Macpherson's Ossian, is it not poetry? Wordsworth says it is not-but Christopher North says it is-with all reverence for the King. Let its antiquity be given up-let such a state of society as is therein described be declared impossible-let all the inconsistencies and violations of nature ever charged against it be acknowledged-let all its glaring plagiarisms from poetry of modern date inspire what derision they may-and far worse the perpetual repetition of its own imbecilities and inanities, wearying one down even to disgust and anger; yet, in spite of all, are we not made to feel, not only that we are among the mountains, but to forget that there is any other world in existence, save that which glooms and glimmers, and wails and raves around us in mists and clouds, and storms and snows-full of lakes and rivers, sea-intersected and sea-surrounded, with a sky as troublous as the earth-yet both at times visited with a mournful beauty that sinks strangely into the soul —while the shadowy life depictured there eludes not our human sympathies; nor yet, aerial though they be-so sweet and sad are their voices-do there float by as unbeloved, unpitied, or unhonoured-single, or in bands— the ghosts of the brave and beautiful; when the few stars are dim, and the moon is felt, not seen, to be yielding what faint light there may be in the skies. The boat in a moment is a bagpipe; and not only so, but all the mountains are bagpipes, and so are the clouds. All the bagpipes in the world are here, and they fill heaven and earth. 'Tis no exaggeration-much less a fiction-but the soul and body of truth. There Hamish stands stately at the prow; and as the boat hangs by midships on the very point that commands all the echoes, he fills the whole night with the "Campbells are coming," till the sky yells with the gathering as of all the Clans. His eyes are triumphantly fixed on ours to catch their emotions; his fingers cease their twinkling; and still that wild gathering keeps playing of itself among the mountains-fainter and fainter, as it is flung from cliff to cliff, till it dies away far--far off-as if in infinitude-sweet even and soft in its evanescence as some lover's lute. We are now in the bay of Gleno. For though moonlight strangely alters the whole face of nature, confusing its most settled features, and with a gentle glamoury blending with the greensward what once was the grey granite, and investing with apparent woodiness what an hour ago was the desolation of herbless cliffs-yet not all the changes that wondrous nature, in ceaseless ebb and flow, ever wrought on her works, could metamorphose out of our recognition that Glen, in which, one night-long-long ago— "In life's morning march, when our spirit was young!" VOL. II. we were visited by a dream-a dream that shadowed forth in its inexplicable symbols the whole course of our future life-the graves-the tombs where many we loved are now buried-that churchyard, where we hope and believe that one day our own bones will rest. But who shouts from the shore, Hamish-and now, as if through his fingers, sends forth a sharp shrill whistle that pierces the sky? Ah, ha! we ken his shadow in the light, with the roe on his shoulder. 'Tis the schoolmaster of Gleno, bringing down our quarry to the boat-kilted, we declare, like a true Son of the Mist. The shore here is shelving but stony, and our prow is aground. But strong-spined and loined, and strong in their withers, are the M'Dougals of Lorn; and, wading up to the red hairy knees, he has flung the roe into the boat, and followed it himself like a deerhound. So bend to your oars, my hearties--my heroes --the wind freshens, and the tide strengthens from the sea; and at eight knots an hour we shall sweep along the shadows, and soon see the lantern, twinkling as from a lighthouse, on the pole of our Tent. In a boat, upon a great sea-arm, at night, among mountains, who would be so senseless, so soulless as to speak? The hour has its might, "Because not of this noisy world, but silent and divine !" A sound there is in the sea-green swell, and the hollows of the rocks, that keep muttering and muttering, as their entrances feel the touch of the tide. But nothing beneath the moon can be more solemn, now that her aspect is so wan, and that some melancholy spirit has obscured the lustre of the stars. We feel as if the breath of old elegiac poetry were visiting our slumber. All is sad within us, yet why we know not; and the sadness is stranger as it is deeper after a day of almost foolish pastime, spent by a being who believes that he is immortal, and that this life is but the threshold of a life to come. Poor, puny, and paltry pastimes indeed are they all! But are they more so than those pursuits of which the moral poet has sung, "The paths of glory lead but to the grave! Methinks, now, as we are entering into a sabler mass of shadow, that the doctrine of eternal punishment of sins committed in time-but "Here's a health to all good lasses, Let the bumper toast go round!" Rest on your oars, lads. Hamish! the quech! give each man a caulker, that his oar may send a bolder twang from its rollock, and our fish-coble walk the waves like a man-of-war's gig, with the captain on board, going ashore, after a long cruise, to meet his wife. Now she spins! and lo! lights at Kinloch-Etive, and beyond on the breast of the mountain, bright as Hesperus-the Pole-star of our Tent! Well, this is indeed the Londe of Faery! A car with a nag caparisoned at the water edge! On with the roe, |