No sunbeam that darkness dispelling,
Shall waken them up from their gloom.”
Ossian, the blind warrior-poet, survives them all. And now, as he muses on the departure of his kindred heroes and hunters, and on the loneliness of his own state, led by the white-armed Malvina, the betrothed of his fallen son Oscar, he seeks their former haunts, and breathes as he rests in the well-known shades the pathetic lamentation, “the last of my race!”
“Chula tu bàrda nam fonn:
’S taitneach, ach trom do ghuth;
’S taitneach a Mhalmhìne nan sonn;
Leaghaidh bròn am bochd an am tha dubh.”
Croma.
From the picture of Ossian in his shadowy Pagan domain it is refreshing to turn to those names which have played a great part in connection with our earliest Christian civilization and literature. They are the names of Patrick of Strathclyde, Bridget of the South Gaels of Albin, and Columba of Donegal, subsequently of Iona.
The first glimpse we have of Albin on the canvas of written record is a very confusing one. The one outstanding fact is the Roman occupation. The next fact that strikes and enchains the eye is the presence of Christianity in the land. Among the Gaels of the south-west of Scotland we mark the person of Ninian, around whom we see across the ages the light of the gospel shining. This preacher of the cross, of whose labours in Galloway very interesting traces were discovered quite recently, appears to have carried the gospel not only to the Gaels of the south-west, but also to the southern Picts north of the Forth and Clyde. His labours began as early as the year 397, and resulted in the first church organization known in Scotland. The evengelisation of Ninian extended over probably the whole of Romanised Scotland towards the end of the fourth century. The races embraced in his sphere of operations were Latin-speaking peoples of various nations, Brythons, and Gaels.