"She fleets, she sails away; as mist before the wind! and wilt thou not stay, Vinvela? Stay and behold my tears! fair thou appearest, Vinvela! fair thou wast, when alive!
"By the mossy mountain I will sit; on the top of the hill of winds. When mid-day is silent around, O talk with me, Vinvela! come on the light-winged gale! on the breeze of the desert, come! Let me hear thy voice, as thou passest, when mid-day is silent around.'"
The readers of the eighteenth century did not stay to consider whether the foregoing was, or was not, a genuine antique: it suited their taste admirably. Rousseau had brought sentimentalism into favour; the "return to nature" was a kind of creed with the French philosophers: these facts aided greatly in causing the epidemic of Ossianism that overran Europe.
I should not like to be condemned to read nothing but Ossian for a year. The short staccato sentences, the difficulty of getting hold of anything definite amid so many moonbeams, gliding ghosts, whistling reeds, and feasts of shells, has a very debilitating effect on the mind. There is too much weeping: one is constantly saying with Tennyson, "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean." Yet, no one can dip into Macpherson without being rewarded by some phrase of an impressive or refreshing kind, e.g.:—
"Thou art with the years that are gone; thou fadest on my soul."
"Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days?"
"Her steps were like the music of songs; she saw the youth and loved him. He was the stolen sigh of her soul."
"Why does Ossian sing? Soon shall he lie in the narrow house, and no bard shall raise his fame."
"When shall it be morn in the grave to bid the slumberer wake?"
"Mixed with the murmur of waters rose the voice of aged men, who called the forms of night to aid them in the war."