traveler who is
sensible of my worth bend his weary steps, and seek the soul-enlivening
bard, the illustrious son of Fingal; his foot will tread upon my tomb,
but his eyes shall never behold me'; at this time it is, my dear friend,
that, like some renowned and chivalrous knight, I could instantly draw my
sword; rescue my prince from a long, irksome existence of languor and
pain; and then finish by plunging the weapon into my own breast, that I
might accompany the demi-god whom my hand had emancipated."[28]

In his last interview with Charlotte, Werther, who had already determined
upon suicide, reads aloud to her, from "The Songs of Selma," "that tender
passage wherein Armin deplores the loss of his beloved daughter. 'Alone
on the sea-beat rocks, my daughter was heard to complain. Frequent and
loud were her cries. What could her father do? All night I stood on the
shore. I saw her by the faint beam of the moon,'" etc. The reading is
interrupted by a mutual flood of tears. "They traced the similitude of
their own misfortune in this unhappy tale. . . The pointed allusion of
those words to the situation of Werther rushed with all the electric
rapidity of lightning to the inmost recesses of his soul."

It is significant that one of Ossian's most fervent admirers was
Chateaubriand, who has been called the inventor of modern melancholy and
of the primeval forest. Here is a passage from his "Genie du
Christianisme":[29] "Under a cloudy sky, on the coast of that sea whose
tempests were sung by Ossian, their Gothic architecture has something
grand and somber. Seated on a shattered altar in the Orkneys, the
traveler is astonished at the dreariness of those places: sudden fogs,
vales where rises the sepulchral stone, streams flowing through wild
heaths, a few reddish pine trees, scattered over a naked desert studded
with patches of snow; such are the only objects which present themselves
to his view. The wind circulates among the ruins, and their innumerable
crevices become so many tubes, which heave a thousand sighs. Long
grasses wave in the apertures of the domes, and beyond these apertures
you behold the flitting clouds and the soaring sea-eagle. . . Long will
those four stones which mark the tombs of heroes on the moors of
Caledonia, long will they continue to attract the contemplative traveler.
Oscar and Malvina are gone, but nothing is changed in their solitary
country. 'Tis no longer the hand of the bard himsel