at of any poet
of his day, except perhaps Gray."

In another place (Bards of the Bible--'Jeremiah') we have thus spoken of
Ossian:--"We are reminded [by Jeremiah] of the 'Harp of Selma,' and of
blind Ossian sitting amid the evening sunshine of the Highland valley,
and in tremulous, yet aspiring notes, telling to his small silent and
weeping circle, the tale of--

"Old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago."

"It has become fashionable (through Macaulay chiefly) to abuse the
Poems of Ossian; but, admitting their forgery as well as faultiness,
they seem to us in their _better passages_ to approach more nearly than
any English prose to the force, vividness, and patriarchial simplicity
and tenderness of the Old Testament style. Lifting up, like a curtain,
the mist of the past, they show us a world, unique and intensely
poetical, peopled by heroes, bards, maidens, and ghosts, who are
separated by their mist and their mountains from all countries and ages
but their own. It is a great picture, painted on clouds instead of
canvass, and invested with colours as gorgeous as its shades are dark.
Its pathos has a wild sobbing in it, an AEolean tremulousness of tone,
like the wail of spirits. And than Ossian himself, the last of his race,
answering the plaints of the wilderness, the plover's shriek, the hiss
of the homeless stream, the bee in the heather bloom, the rustle of the
birch above his head, the roar of the cataract behind, in a voice of
kindred freedom and kindred melancholy, conversing less with the little
men around him than with the giant spirits of his fathers, we have few
finer figures in the whole compass of poetry. Ossian is a ruder
"Robber," a more meretricious "Seasons," like them a work of prodigal
beauties and more prodigal faults, and partly through both, has
impressed the world."

Dr Johnson's opposition to Ossian is easily explained by his aversion to
Scotland, by his detestation of what he deemed a fraud, by his dislike
for what he heard was Macpherson's private character, and by his
prejudice against all unrhymed poetry, whether it was blank verse or
rhythmical prose. And yet, his own prose was rhythmical, and often as
tumid as the worst bombast in Macpherson. He was too, on the whole, an
artificial writer, while the best parts of Ossian are natural. He
allowed himself therefore to see distinctly and to characterise severely
the bad things in the book--where it sunk into the bathos or s