called Sensibility set the tone to scores of volumes. Everywhere there was tenderness, and on every page tears were shed. Rousseau, the first of the romanticists, abandoned himself to griefs for which there was in his life more cause than some of his critics have allowed. To turn his pages is to find everywhere the words attendrissement, l'âme sensible, mes douleurs, mes souffrances, mes maux. The movement culminated when the revolt and despair of Lord Byron had become the theme of all Europe.

All

Now Macpherson's poems were, as he himself said in his preface, " calculated to please persons of exquisite feelings of heart." Fingal and his soldiers have none of that hardness of temper which constant warfare might bring about. are men of sensibility in the modern mode. Although Fingal is victorious in every battle, yet he is seldom happy. Love affairs are frequent, but few of them end in marriage. The young hero is slain in battle, or the maiden herself is slain; the survivor dies of grief, and both are buried together in one grave. Over them the bards lament. Ossian, the narrator, has himself fallen on evil days. He is old; he has become blind; the comrades of his youth are dead and gone. He pours out his laments to the soft notes of a harp. His haunting theme is the transience of human life, the inevitable coming of loss, decay and death. And, as a background to this pathetic figure, Macpherson, with a true instinct, has placed the gloomiest

scenery of his native land,—the clouds that hang low over the dark-brown mountains, the rushing torrent, the wind that sighs mournfully through the bending trees.

The burden of his songs can best be shown by a citation. It is the Address to the Sun,—the most famous passage of all :

"O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers! Whence are thy beams, O sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty; the stars hide themselves in the sky; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave. But thou thyself movest alone; who can be a companion of thy course! The oaks of the mountains fall; the mountains themselves decay with years; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon herself is lost in heaven; but thou art for ever the same; rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. When the world is dark with tempests; when thunder rolls and lightning flies; thou lookest in thy beauty, from the clouds, and laughest at the storm. But to Ossian thou lookest in vain; for he beholds thy beams no more; whether thy yellow hair flows on the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west. But thou art, perhaps, like me, for a season, thy years will have an end. Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds, careless of the voice of the morning. Exult then, O sun, in the strength of thy youth! Age is dark and unlovely; it is like the glimmering light of the moon, when it shines through broken clouds, and the mist is on the hills; the blast of the north is on the plain; the traveller shrinks in the midst of his journey."

Passages such as these have a beauty of their

own.

The measured prose in which they are

written advances with a solemn sweep: it seemed free and expansive to men who had grown weary of sharp epigrams set in trimly compacted couplets. And even now we cannot read them without something of the vague feeling of poetic mystery and sadness that captivated their first readers stealing over the mind.

The poems of Macpherson met with immense and universal popularity. Before many years had passed, they were translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Polish, and Russian; they have appeared even in Modern Greek. No English author before him, not Shakespeare, Milton, Addison or Pope, had found such hosts of foreign admirers; no one after him except Byron, hardly even Sir Walter Scott and Dickens, has had a greater fame. To this day the belief that Ossian is one of the glories of English literature, a burning planet in our sky, lingers over the Continent. But its influence was greatest in Germany, where the younger school of poets, having thrown off the classical tradition, lacked something to replace the classical models. Ossian came to them as dew upon the earth. It was studied and absorbed until an Ossianic colour was diffused over all they wrote. The emergence of the Celtic heroworld prompted them to revive that of Germany itself, a counterpart to Fingal being found in Hermann, the Arminius of Tacitus, who routed the legions of Rome, and thus asserted the supre

macy of native valour over a decayed but aggressive civilisation. His deeds were celebrated by Klopstock in a drama where Cheruscan bards. furnish the chorus, chanting hymns to Wodan and songs of victory.

A theme of discussion sprang up, which was accepted then in utter earnestness: the comparison of Homer with Ossian, the epic poetry of the Greeks with that of the Scots. Ossian was declared to be a hundred times more barbarous than Homer, his inspiration more simple, more naïve, closer to Nature itself. His poetry was really the poetry of the heart; for one felt everywhere a heart animated by noble sentiments and tender passions. The poet Voss exclaimed, "What is the use of beauty in Nature ? The Scotsman Ossian is a greater poet than the Ionian Homer." Klopstock was on the same side. Oblivion, he said, had long covered Ossian, but now he had been brought to light, rivalled the Grecian, and defied him. In France, when the romantic movement had invaded it, Lamartine continued the argument, placing the bard above Homer and on a level with Dante.1 Even Byron fell into the fashion. In his copy of Macpherson, now in the library at Harvard, he wrote down his conclusions. There is no hero in the Iliad or Odyssey who is at once so brave and so amiable as the King of Morven, the splendour

1 See Texte's Jean Jacques Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitisme Littéraire, 1895, p. 401.

of his fame being untarnished by one mean or inhuman act. He is equally the object of our admiration, esteem and love. In sublimity of sentiment and vivacity of description, Byron adds, Ossian may claim a full equality of merit with Homer, although greatly inferior to him in the invention of character and incidents.1

Criticism so unreal serves only to show how acute minds may be obscured by a popular illusion. A wiser judge of letters, Goethe himself, was for a time one of Ossian's adherents, and mentioned him along with Shakespeare. From his father's house at Frankfort he wrote to Herder, who had brought both to his notice, that he was now preaching them earnestly among his friends. He had found a flock of admirers for the English poet, and was translating fragments of Ossian, that he might proclaim him also from a full heart. But it was rather for a dramatic purpose that he afterwards introduced the Poems of Ossian into Werther, and made them the companion of its hero, in whose affection they supplant Homer, his earlier favourite. Werther speaks of them with hardly less enthusiasm than of Charlotte herself.

"You should see the poor figure I make when she is spoken of in company, when people actually ask me how I like her. Like! I hate the word like death. What sort of man must that be who

1 W. L. Phelps, Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, 1899, p. 154.

2 Der Junge Goethe, i. 299.