In an Irish poem from which quotations have been [made the bard] is represented as blind. In two of these pieces we have touching allusion to the same melancholy infliction. “Vain to me are thy bright rays” occurs in the Address to the Sun, and “the bard’s eye that ne’er sees thy light” in the Address to the Rising Sun. The soul of the old poet seemed to take delight in contrasting his own sightless condition with the brilliant sun in his course through the heavens. This tone of melancholy pleasure—of deep and lonely nurtured feeling—so characteristic of the Ossianic poems, is [also characteristic] of the Celtic race, especially of the Scottish Gael, whose spirit seems to have been enswathed in the majestic gloom of his own native glens and mountains. The curtains of mist hanging over the silent and weird-looking lochs, the ghost-like clouds that glided across the glens or inwrapped the crests of the hills, the moan of the sounding seashore mingling with the roar of a hundred streams forcing their ways to join the boundless ocean, are sights and sounds which naturally exerted a powerful influence on the souls of those who lived daily in their midst. When the tempests darkened round the earth, and lightnings flashed, and the hoarse-voiced thunder shook the hills, how pleasant it must have been for the depressed spirit of man to gaze on the face of the sun, looking “fair through the storm” “upon the troubled heavens under” of a Hebridean sky!
These are specimens of a great deal of poetry which Highlanders of the present day unhesitatingly ascribe to Ossian. Indeed, the Ossian of these pieces appears to be a poet of quite a different calibre from that of the old ballads. One thing is clear that whoever was the author or authors of these much discussed productions, he or they were poets of the highest order, and must have been Gaels born and bred in the Highlands.
CHAPTER X.
OLD LAYS.
“Lean gu dlù ri cliù do shinnsear;
’S na dich’nich a bhi mar iadsan.”—Seann Dan.
English:
Follow thou thy fathers’ fame;