f that sweeps the
harp; the tones we hear are the slight trembling of the strings, produced
by the touch of a spirit, when announcing at night, in a lonely chamber,
the death of a hero. . . So when he sits in the silence of noon in the
valley of his breezes is the murmur of the mountain to Ossian's ear: the
gale drowns it often in its course, but the pleasant sound returns again."

In Byron's passion for night and tempest, for the wilderness, the
mountains, and the sea, it is of course impossible to say how large a
share is attributable directly to MacPherson's "Ossian," or more
remotely, through Chateaubriand and other inheritors of the Ossianic
mood. The influence of any particular book becomes dispersed and blended
with a hundred currents that are in the air. But I think one has often a
consciousness of Ossian in reading such passages as the famous apostrophe
to the ocean in "Childe Harold"--

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!"--

Which recalls the address to the sun in Carthous--"O thou that rollest
above, round as the shield of my fathers,"--perhaps the most hackneyed
_locus classicus_ in the entire work; or as the lines beginning,

"O that the desert were my dwelling place;"[30]

or the description of the storm in the Jura:

"And this is in the night: Most glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber. Let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight
A portion of the tempest and of thee."[30]

Walter Scott, while yet a lad, made acquaintance with Ossian through Dr.
Blacklock, and was at first delighted; but "the tawdry repetitions of the
Ossianic phraseology," he confesses, "disgusted me rather sooner than
might have been expected from my age." He afterward contributed an essay
on the authenticity of the poems to the proceedings of the Speculative
Club of Edinburgh. In one sense of the word Scott was the most romantic
of romanticists; but in another sense he was very little romantic, and
there was not much in his sane, cheerful, and robust nature upon which
such poetry as Ossian could fasten.[31] It is just at this point,
indeed, that definitions diverge and the two streams of romantic tendency
part company. These Carlyle has called "Wertherism" and "Goetzism"[32]
_i.e._ sentimentalism and mediaevalism, though so mild a word as
sentimentalism fails to express adequately the morbid despair to which
"Werther" gave utterance, and has associations with works of a ve