and imagination, and consequently possessing all the radical characters of poetry: and, secondly, that we may expect to meet with the boldest and most frequent use of this kind of language in those periods of every nation in which the passions have been most unrestrained and luxuriant, and therefore in their earliest and least cultivated state; for we have already seen, that in this state the most vehement and energetic passions are in perpetual play and activity.

Now, the whole history of the world will confirm us in these two general corollaries; and it has hence been said, and in a restricted sense said truly, that the language of poetry is older than that of prose. Its principles are founded in nature, and in nature in her simplest and most unsophisticated state and it is to these principles mankind uniformly recur, whenever hurried by a violent shock of feeling from the polished tameness and monotony of colloquial speech. It is then we return to exclamations, interrogations, broken sentences, bold and daring comparisons; and, whether we be indifferent to the world or not, succeed in interesting it in our fate and condition.

Where, among uncultivated tribes, the passions chiefly called into exercise have been of the pleasurable and sprightly kind, such as we have already seen are the natural result of warmth and beneficence of climate, of tranquil scenery, and an atmosphere perfumed by the rival odours of spontaneous blossoms and balsams, the rude burst of delight has assumed a more regular or measured character, and been uttered in the form of chant or brisk melody, with such corresponding attitudes or movements of the body as might best co-operate in proving the exuberant gayety of the heart. And hence music and dancing are nearly of as early origin as poetry: they were prompted by the same impulse, and had a direct tendency to heighten each other's power; while ingenuity soon taught the more dexterous of the tribes to imitate musical sounds by the invention of the simple instruments of pipes and rebecks. The Greek philosophers ingeniously and perhaps correctly ascribed the first carols of the human voice to an imitation of the wild notes of the birds; and the first idea of musical instruments to the occasional whispers of the breeze among beds of hollow reeds. Lucretius has expressed himself upon this subject with so much sweetness, that I lament the constraint I feel under of quoting him before a popular audience rather in a translation than in his native beauty and elegance; yet the following verses will, I presume, give a faint idea of the high merit of the original:—

And from the liquid warblings of the birds
Learn'd they their first rude notes, ere music yet
To the rapt ear had tuned the measured verse;
And Zephyr, whispering through the hollow reeds,
Taught the first swains the hollow reeds to sound;
Whence woke they soon those tender-trembling tones
Which the sweet pipe, when by the fingers press'd,
Pours o'er the hills, the vales, the woodlands wild,
Haunts of lone shepherds and the rural gods.
Thus soothed they every care, with music thus
Closed every meal, for rests the bosom then.
And oft they threw them on the velvet grass,
Near gliding streams, by shadowy trees o'erarch'd,
And, though no gold was theirs, found still the means
To gladden life. But chief when genial Spring
Led forth her laughing train, and the young year
Painted the meads with roseate flowers profuse,-
Then mirth, and wit, and wiles, and frolic, chief
Flow'd from the heart; for then the rustic Muse
Warmest inspired them; then convivial sport
Around their heads, their shoulders, taught to twine
Foliage, and flowers, and garlands, richly dight;
To loose, innumerous time their limbs to move,
And beat with sturdy foot maternal earth;
While many a smile and many a laughter loud
Told all was new, and wondrous much esteem'd.
Thus wakeful lived they; cheating of its rest
The drowsy midnight; with the jocund dance
Mixing gay converse, madrigals, and strains,
Run o'er the reeds with broad recumbent lip
As, wakeful still, our revellers through night

Ff

Lead on their defter dance to time precise,
Yet cull not costlier sweets, with all their art,

Than the rude offspring earth in woodlands bore.

Nature is ever the same; and hence music, and dancing, and poetry, and impassioned language are to be found at this moment, in all their energy and irregular wildness, among the barbarians of North America, those of the Polynesian islands, and even the negro tribes of Africa: while not unfrequently we hear an equally daring and figurative diction, though of a very different kind, vented by the last in a state of Mexican or West Indian slavery, alternately intermixed with terrible execrations on the heads of their cruel taskmasters, and with the most piteous longings for freedom and their native land.

In like manner it existed, and was even cultivated with systematic attention, among the earliest savages of the hyperboreal snows, the Goths, Scythians, or Scandinavians; nor less so among the Celtic tribes of Gaul, Britain, and Ireland. The scalds of the former, and the bards or druids of the latter, were always held in the highest dignity and admiration; their persons were esteemed sacred; their rhapsodies were in measured flow, and had an enthusiastic effect in rousing their fellow-countrymen to arms, to religious rites, or funeral lamentations; in rehearsing the dangers they had encountered, and the victories they had gained; and in stimulating them to a contempt of torment and death under every shape, in the high career of heroic exploits, and the glory of living in the national hymns of future ages.

Such was the death-song of Regner Lodbrok, a Danish prince of the eighth century, and one of the most celebrated scalds of his day. It mischanced the warrior to fall into the hands of his enemies, by whom he was thrown into prison, and condemned to be destroyed by serpents. In this situation he solaced himself with rehearsing all the exploits of his life; and the following is a part of the ferocious verses he composed in the immediate prospect of the fate reserved for him, translated word for word by Olaus Wormius from the Runic original: "He only regrets this life who has never known distress: he who aspires to the love of virgins, ought always to be foremost in the roar of arms. In the halls of our father Balder (or Odin) I know there are seats prepared, where in a short time we shall drink ale out of the hollow sculls of our enemies. In the house of the mighty Odin no brave man laments death. I come not with the voice of despair to Odin's hall." Mr. Gray has been peculiarly happy in inspiriting the old patriotic bard of Cambria with a similar contempt of death. The entire description is well known to every one; but it cannot be too often repeated, and ought not to be neglected on the present occasion. The picture of his standing on the battlements of Conway Castle, and terrifying the English conqueror with his dying prophecy, as the latter was descending the shaggy steep of Snowdon, is exquisite and inimitable.

The detail of the

On a rock, whose haughty brow

Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood,

Robed in the sable garb of wo,

With haggard eyes the poet stood

(Loose his beard and hoary hair

Stream'd, like a meteor to the troubled air),

And with a master's hand and prophet's fire
Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre.

prophecy is too long for quotation; but the following fragments, which form its opening and ending, ought by no means to be

omitted.

Helm, nor hawberk's twisted mail,

Nor e'en thy virtues, tyrant! shall avail

To save thy secret soul from nightly fears

From Cambria's curse, from Cambria's tears!

Fond, impious man! think'st thou yon sanguine cloud
Raised by thy breath, has quench'd the orb of day?
To-morrow he repairs the golden flood,

And warms the nations with redoubled ray.
Enough for me!-with joy I see

The different doom our fates assign.

Be thine despair, and sceptred care

To triumph and to die are mine.

He spoke and headlong from the mountain's height
Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.

The first of these descriptions is derived from a people of Gothic or Scythian origin, whose ferocity of manners I have formerly pointed out, and endeavoured to account for the second refers to a race of Celts or Cymbrians, for the most part of milder affections, and some tribes of which appear at a very early era of their history, and even in the infancy of civilization, to have evinced a tenderness of sentiment, a fecundity of imagery, and a cultivation of style, that are truly wonderful, and have never been satisfactorily accounted for. And I now particularly allude to the traditional poems of the Highlands and the adjoining isles, so well known from Mr. Macpherson's translation, and occasional interweavings. Such is the elegance and delicacy of taste, as well as sublime genius and national enthusiasm, of these singular productions, that Dr. Johnson, as many of us may perhaps recollect, was to the last an infidel as to their genuineness. The first, however, has been sufficiently ascertained of late by the indefatigable and valuable exertions of the Highland Society, formed for the express purpose of inquiring into the nature and authenticity of the poems of Ossian, the Homer of the Highlands; whose report has been published by Mr. Mackenzie, their liberal and enlightened chairman. They have sufficiently established the important fact, that Ossian is not an imaginary being; that his name and general history are at this moment preserved by tradition over the whole of the Highlands and the Hebrides; and that several of his poems, to an extent of many hundred lines, as literally rendered by Macpherson, still live in the memory of many of the oldest inhabitants, of the simplest manners, and who are incapable either of writing or reading, having been taught them by their fathers in early life, as their fathers had in like manner received them from a long line of progenitors through an immemorial period. These poems, or fragments of poems, have in various instances been taken down in the original Gaelic, from the mouths of the venerable reciters by persons of the greatest respectability, many of them appointed for this purpose by the Society I am now speaking of; and on being compared with each other, and with Macpherson's version, have been found to possess a close and literal agreement, in many instances through a range of some hundreds of lines, particularly in the important poems of Caricthura and Fingal. While, to enable the public to form a fuller judgment upon the subject, and to free themselves from every charge of prejudice, the committee, in their very excellent report, have not only given an unmutilated copy of their correspondence, but extensive specimens of the original Gaelic itself, together with a new and verbal translation as well as Mr. Macpherson's

version.

Against such evidence it is impossible to shut our eyes; and admitting it, we must conclude with the committee, that, though Mr. Macpherson may have taken occasional liberties with the text from which he translated, omitted some passages, and supplied others that were perhaps lost, yet that the poetry called Ossianic is genuine; that it was common, and in great abundance; that it was peculiarly striking and impressive, and in a high degree eloquent, tender, and sublime. Of the epoch in which Ossian flourished we can form a tolerable guess: for, with occasional references to several of the earlier Roman emperors, and especially to Caracalla, the son of Severus, who by Ossian is called Caracal, we find through the whole of his accredited poems a total unacquaintance with the Christian religion; and hence he can scarcely

be allowed to have lived earlier than in the second, or later than in the third or fourth century of the Christian era. So that the poems of Ossian must be of an antiquity not less by three or four centuries than the descent of Cæsar upon the British coast. And consequently we have at this moment a living proof of the existence of traditionary poems of the highest pretensions to genius, sublimity, and regularity of structure, that have been kept afloat in the memories of different generations for upwards of a thousand years, and some of them with but few variations, or loss of their original integrity.

To account, in some degree, for this striking and isolated fact, we must, in the first place, recollect, that these poems are strictly national; and, by a perpetual appeal to national passions and feelings, must have deeply interested every one who heard them in their preservation. Secondly, we know from the writings of Julius Cæsar, that the British druids, and, consequently, the British bards, on his landing were imbodied into distinct colleges, subject to a discipline of rigid study, and compelled to commit to memory so great an extent of verses, that many of them required not less than twenty years to complete this part of their education; it being held impious to record sacred poems in written characters, or to transmit them in any other way than by tradition from race to race. And, lastly, it should not be forgotten that poetry constituted the noblest science of these early times, and that the highest honour a hero could receive was to be celebrated in deathless verse. To die unlamented by a bard was deemed, indeed, so great a misfortune as even to disturb the ghosts of the deceased in another state. They wander," says the son of Fingal," in thick mists beside the reedy lake; but never shall they rise WITHOUT SONG to the dwelling of the winds."

66

Ossian seems to have been wonderfully skilled in the language of all the passions. Equally vehement, gentle, and sublime, he could rouse at his will the fury of the brave, or melt him to tears of tenderness. The following passage, being part of the address of Fingal to his grandson Oscar, is full of heroism and fine feeling; and I give it from the version of Dr. Donald Smith rather than from that of Mr. Macpherson, as being not only more literal, but more beautiful :

Son of my son! said the king,

O Oscar, pride of the generous youth!

I saw the gleaming of thy sword,

And I gloried to behold thee victorious in the battle:

Tread close on the fame of thy fathers,

And cease not to be what they have been.

When Trenmor lived, of glorious deeds,

And Trathal, the father of heroes,

They fought every battle with success.-
Oscar! bend thou the strong in arms;
Protect the weak of hand, and the needy.

Be as a spring-tide stream in winter

To resist the foes of the people of Fingal ;
But like the soft and gentle breeze of summer

To those who ask thine aid.

So lived the conquering Trenmor;

Such after him was Trathal, of victorious prowess,

And Fingal-the support of the feeble.

On a day when Fingal had but few in his train,

By the fall of the soft murmuring Roya,

There was seen to sail in the midst of the ocean

A boat that conveyed a lovely woman.

It neither halted nor slackened

Till it reached the river-fall:

When out of it rose the beauty of female form.

She shone as a beam of the sun;

Her look exceeded her figure.

"Branch of beauty! covered with the dew of grief,"

This calmly I said,

"If blue [naked] swords can defend thee,

Our dauntless hearts will second them."

"Thy protection I claim, for thou art Fingal,"

Replied the daughter of youth:

"By the excellence of thy might, and by thine eloquence,

I claim speedy and opportune protection.

Thy countenance is a sun to the forlorn,

Thy shield is the dwelling place of mercy.

I am pursued over the sea:

A hero of heavy wrath is following my track;

The son of Sora's king pursues me;

The mighty chief-whose name is Mayro Borb.
"Rest thou here under my protection,

Beautiful form of the fairest hue!

And, in defiance of Mayro Borb,

Thou shalt find safety under the shade of my shield."

Perhaps the two sublimest passages in the poems of Ossian are, his Address to the Sun in his Carthon, and his description of the Spirit of Loda in his Caricthura, the genuineness of both which is ascertained beyond the power of suspicion. The first evinces sublimity combined with exquisite tenderness; and has a near resemblance to Milton's admirable address of the same kind. The second evinces sublimity combined with majestic terror, and has as near a resemblance to the mighty Spirit of the Cape in Camoens's Lusiad, though it is greatly superior. We have not time for quoting both these passages, and I shall confine myself, therefore, to the latter. I shall quote from Mr. Macpherson's version, which is sufficiently true to the original.

"The wan cold moon rose in the east. Sleep descended on the youths. Their blue helmets glitter to the beam. But sleep did not rest on the king. He rose in the midst of his arms, and slowly ascended the hill, to behold the flame of Sarno's tower.-The flame was dim and distant; the moon hid her red face in the east. A blast came from the mountain: on its wings was the spirit of Loda. He came to his place in his terrors, and shook his dusky spear. His eyes appear like flames in his dark face: his voice is like distant thunder. Fingal advanced his spear in night, and raised his voice on high. 'Son of night, retire: call thy winds, and fly! Why dost thou come to my presence with thy shadowy arms? Do I fear thy gloomy form, spirit of dismal Loda? Weak is thy shield of clouds; feeble is that meteor thy sword! The blast rolls them together: and thou thyself art lost. Fly from my presence, son of night! call thy winds and fly!'

"Dost thou force me from my place?' replied the hollow voice. 'I turn the battle in the field of the brave. I look on the nations, and they vanish: my nostrils pour the blast of death. I come abroad on the winds: the tempests are before my face. But my dwelling is calm above the clouds; pleasant are the fields of my rest.'

"Dwell in thy pleasant fields,' said the king. 'Let Comhal's son be forgotten. Do my steps ascend from my hills into thy peaceful plains? Do I meet thee with a spear on thy cloud, spirit of dismal Loda? Why then dost thou frown on me? Why shake thine airy spear? Thou frownest in vain : I never fled from the mighty in war; and shall the sons of the wind frighten the king of Morven? No-he knows the weakness of their arms.'

"Fly to thy land,' replied the form, 'take to the wind, and fly! The blasts are in the hollow of my hand: the course of the storm is mine. The king of Sora (the enemy of Fingal) is my son; he bends at the stone of my power. His battle is around Caricthura; and he will prevail! Fly to thy land, son of Comhal, or feel my flaming wrath!'

"He lifted high his shadowy spear! he bent forward his dreadful height. Fingal, advancing, drew his sword, the blade of dark-brown Luno. The gleaming path of the steel winds through the gloomy ghost. The form fell shapeless into air."

Ullin, Orran, and other ancient Gaelic bards, seem to have been almost as celebrated as Ossian; and even of Ossian's poetry Mr. Macpherson has not, perhaps, after all, selected the most beautiful. The "Death of Gaul," published in 1780, by Dr. Smith of Campbelton, in Argyleshire, and accompanied with the original, as taken down from the memory of different Highland families, is one of the sweetest and tenderest, and, at the same time, one of the most regular pieces that has ever been composed in any language. Gaul was the bosom friend of Oscar, the son of Ossian, and the grandson of Fingal. The story, in few words, is as follows. Fingal summoned his heroes for an expedition to the isle of Ifrona. A flood in the river Strumon prevented Gaul