In bodies’ and souls’ undoing.
REV. DUNCAN MACCALLUM.
This was an able minister of the Church of Scotland, who was for some time settled at Arisaig. Collath is a poem of the heroic kind, which Mackenzie had inserted in “The Beauties” as a specimen of ancient poetry! Mr MacCallum published it first anonymously, as he did another booklet in which he acknowledged himself to be the author of Collath. His poetry shows fair poetic gifts. We meet with MacCallum again as the author of a Church History.
REV. DUNCAN MACLEAN.
The late Free Church minister of Glenorchy, Mr MacLean, was a religious poet of great power and originality. Buchanan, Morrison, and he are poets of the first order. The “Gaelic Hymns” of MacLean appeared in 1868 in a small closely-printed volume. The pieces in this volume are rather religious poems than hymns. A keenly æsthetical spirit pervades all that MacLean has written; and he has written more than any of the first-class religious bards. He is exceedingly rich in poetic illustration, and very profound in thought. He was a man of wide general culture, and he brought the power and fruits of it with him into the sphere of Gaelic religious poetry. But though his countrymen highly appreciated his able ministrations in that language in the pulpit, they do not appear to be ready to understand that they have such a deep mine of fresh and original thought in his poetry. The thoughtful reader, however, will at once feel that MacLean is a man of great culture and a poet of a high order, in full sympathy with man and the works of creation. Like Morrison of Harris, he is too profound for the present popular taste. Here are some translated verses of one of his best poems, on the scenery of his native place:—
As I sit on the knoll, on the steep scarpy height,
And lonely survey all that falls ’neath my sight,
My crowding thoughts, stirred in their slumber, fast roll
In currents resistless all over my soul.
Loch Tay there I see with a beautiful shade