The bards in Ossian occasionally exercise the power of looking into the mirror of the future. So in the ode “Weissagung” (1773), the poet seizes the Telyn and prophesies; likewise in the ode “Die Rosstrappe” (1771);[93] in both, however, the sacred white horses mentioned by Tacitus, but not found in Ossian, play a part.
A frequent device that we find in Klopstock, especially at the height of his enthusiasm for Ossian, is the conjuring up of the spirits of the departed. Doubtless the songs of Ossian, in which the ghosts of the fallen play such an important rôle, inspired Klopstock with a fondness for this device. We must hold Ossian accountable, for example, when in the ode “Thuiskon” (1764) the hoary ancestor of the German people is made to appear in the grove of the modern German bards. Similarly an old bard is conjured up in the ode “Der Hügel, und der Hain” (1767); in the ode “Rothschilds Gräber” (1766) the souls of the departed appear to the poet, and spirits that hover around Braga or the goddess of the German language occur frequently in the odes of the period that coincides with Klopstock’s most intense interest in Ossian.[94]
The influence of Ossian is particularly manifest in the first of the odes mentioned in the previous paragraph, in “Thuiskon.” We have but to read the ode and for comparison the “Address to the Evening Star” and the “Apostrophe to Fingal and his Times” in “The Songs of Selma,”[95] to notice the resemblance. The time of the ghosts’ appearance in both is at the rising of the evening star, which in “Thuiskon” sends down “entwölkte Schimmer,” while in Ossian it “lifts its head from its clouds.” Compare also ll. 5–6:
So entsenket die Erscheinung des Thuiskon, wie Silber stäubt
Von fallendem Gewässer ...
with “Fingal comes like a watery column of mist.”[96]
Another ode of the same year, “Die frühen Gräber” (1764), shows undoubted traces of Ossian’s influence. The entire Stimmung is Ossianic and Ossianic touches are not wanting, as when the poet says, ll. 9–10:
Ihr Edleren, ach es bewächst
Eure Maale schon ernstes Moos!
The poems of Ossian teem with laments for the departed, whose graves are marked by stones, grown over with moss. The danger of referring everything in Klopstock that savors of the Gaelic bard to Ossian has been pointed out, yet Ossian undoubtedly accentuated and brought into stronger relief much that already existed.