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But it is a prose which is often far more beautiful and poetical than much that is called poetry. Although at first Macpherson's book was received with great delight, soon people began to doubt about it. The Irish first of all were jealous, for they said that Ossian was an Irish poet, that the heroes of the poems were Irish, and that Macpherson was stealing their national heroes from them.
For many hours after sunrise the mountain ridges and passes retained their ordinary appearance of silence and solitude, and the Chiefs, with their followers, amused themselves with various pastimes, in which the joys of the shell, as Ossian has it, were not forgotten.
He could not introduce in its unyielding lines that shadowy and sketchy indecision, which, disguising the skeleton, the whole frame-work of form, drapes it in the mist of floating vapors, such as surround the white-bosomed maids of Ossian, when they permit mortals to catch some vague, yet lovely outline, from their home in the changing, drifting, blinding clouds.
Their history consisted in traditional tales, in which the heroic deeds of their forefathers were celebrated. These were apparently in verse, and thus constituted part of the poetry as well as the history of the Druids. In the poems of Ossian we have, if not the actual productions of Druidical times, what may be considered faithful representations of the songs of the Bards.
And soon a dire defeat will come upon the Fenians, and few children will be left to them to carry on the race. It is not for you that I grieve, O Fionn, but for Ossian and for Oscar, and for the rest of my faithful comrades. And you shall lack me sorely yet, O Fionn. 'I am near of kin to you, O Fionn, said Oscar, 'but you shall not do Diarmid this wrong.
Believe me, Your well-wisher, David Ossian Macrae. The enclosure bore this inscription: CHARLES FERMIN, ESQ., Offices of the Orb, Strand, London. I had received the letter at breakfast. I took a cab, and drove straight to the Orb. At the top of these I was confronted by a glass door, beyond which, entrenched behind a desk, sat a cynical-looking youth.
Stuart, who was on her way back from Bombay to England. The Emperor conversed with her on the manners and customs of India, and on the inconveniences of a long voyage at sea, particularly to ladies. He alluded to Scotland, Mrs. Stuart's native country, expatiated on the genius of Ossian, and congratulated his fair interlocutor on the preservation of her clear northern complexion.
Alas! it too is doomed to disappear, this emerald set in the Western seas. Arthur will return no more from his isle of faery, and St. Patrick was right when he said to Ossian, "The heroes that thou weepest are dead; can they be born again?" It is high time to note, before they shall have passed away, the divine tones thus expiring on the horizon before the growing tumult of uniform civilisation.
The actinic influence of a ghost on a sensitive plate is not so strong as might be desired; but considering that spirits are so nearly immaterial, that the stars, as Ossian tells us, can be seen through their vaporous outlines, the effect is perhaps as good as ought to be expected. Mrs. Brown, for instance, has lost her infant, and wishes to have its spirit-portrait taken with her own.
This is taking it at its lowest, of course; when we go a little further and take a sentence like the famous remark about Ossian, "Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever if he would abandon his mind to it," the sting in the word "abandon" is the sort of thing which other people devise at their desks, but which Johnson has ready on his lips for immediate use.
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