vergreen pine raving in the tempest.
Professor Wilson, in his "Cottages" and his "Glance at Selby's
Ornithology," is still more decidedly Celtic in his mode of writing;
and, in his paper in Blackwood for November 1839, "Have you read
Ossian?" he has bestowed some generous, though measured praise, on his
writings. He says, for instance--"Macpherson had a feeling of the
beautiful, and this has infused the finest poetry into many of his
descriptions of the wilderness. He also was born and bred among the
mountains, and though he had neither the poetical nor the philosophical
genius of Wordsworth, and was inferior far in the perceptive, the
reflective, and the imaginative faculties, still he could _see_, and
_feel_, and _paint_ too, in water colours and on air canvass, and is one
of the Masters." Hear next Wilson's great rival in criticism, Hazlitt.
They were, on many points bitter enemies, on two they were always at
one--Wordsworth and Ossian! "Ossian is a feeling and a name that can
never be destroyed in the minds of his readers. As Homer is the first
vigour and lustihood, Ossian is the decay and old age of poetry. He
lives only in the recollection and regret of the past. There is one
impression which he conveys more entirely than all other poets--namely,
the sense of privation--the loss of all things, of friends, of good
name, of country--he is even without God in the world. He converses only
with the spirits of the departed, with the motionless and silent clouds.
The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre on his head, the fox peeps out
of the ruined tower, the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale,
and the strings of his harp seem as the hand of age, as the tale of
other times passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in
the winter's wind! If it were indeed possible to shew that this writer
was nothing, it would only be another instance of mutability, another
blank made, another void left in the heart, another confirmation of that
feeling which makes him so often complain--'Roll on, ye dark brown year,
ye bring no joy in your wing to Ossian!'" "The poet Gray, too," says
Wilson, "frequently in his Letters expresses his wonder and delight in
the beautiful and glorious inspirations of the Son of the Mist." Even
Malcolm Laing--Macpherson's most inveterate foe--who edited Ossian for
the sole purpose of revenge, exposure, and posthumous dissection, is
compelled to say that "Macpherson's genius is equal to th