Glenmasan! O Glenmasan; High its herbs, fair its boughs. Solitary was the place of our repose On grassy Invermasan.
Gleneitche! O Gleneitche! There was raised my earliest home. Beautiful its woods on rising, When the sun struck on Gleneitche.
Glen Urchain! O Glen Urchain! It was the straight glen of smooth ridges. Not more joyful was a man of his age Than Naoise in Glen Urchain.
Glendaruadh! O Glendaruadh! My love each man of its inheritance. Sweet the voice of the cuckoo on bending bough, On the hill above Glendaruadh.
Beloved is Draighen and its sounding shore; Beloved the water o’er pure sand. O that I might not depart from the east, But that I go with my beloved![39]
The third class of Ossianic poems belongs principally to that period when, during the sway of the Lords of the Isles, Irish influence was so much felt on the language and literature of the Highlands, and when the Highland bards and sennachies were trained in bardic schools, presided over by Irish bards of eminence. It was at this period mainly that the Irish poems assumed so much the shape of a dialogue between the Ossianic poets and St. Patrick, the apostle of Ireland; and the Highland bards imitated this form, often adding or prefixing a few sentences of such dialogue to older poems, or composing poems in imitation of Ossian in this form; but the imitation, in this respect, of Irish poems by native bards is apparent from this, that Patrick is in the Irish poems correctly called Mac Calphurn or M’Alphurn, his father, according to his own “Confessio,” having been Calphurnius, but the Highland bards, to whom Patrick’s history was strange, and this epithet unintelligible, have substituted the peculiarly Scotch form of Alpine, and styled him Patrick Mac Alpine.
One of the poems in Macpherson’s fragments has been one of these—the sixth fragment,—which begins and ends with a dialogue between Ossian and the son of Alpin.
It was at the same period that the collection of Gaelic poems was made by the Dean of Lismore, and it includes many poems in which this dialogue occurs, but in most the saint is termed Macalpine, showing its non-Irish source.
The Ossianic poems in this collection attributed to Ossian, Fergus Filidh, and Caoilte, the three Fenian bards, and those which are either anonymous or composed by imitators, as Gillecalum Mac an Olla and Allan Mac Ruadhri, with the other poems which are not Ossianic, afford a fair specimen of the poetic literature current in the Highlands of Scotland at the close of this period, and before the fall of the Lords of the Isles, and the Reformation again severed that country from Ireland, and ushered in a period of reaction and return towards the native dialect and literature.
On the whole, then, we fully admit the claims of Ireland to Fenian legends and tales, and their attendant poems, but not to an exclusive possession of them.