Blair Collection > Galic antiquities

ijS GAUL:
Scrumon. The ghofts of the feeble would behold thee and &y,
' There the father of him who once fled in Ifrona.' No ; thy
fon will not fly, O Morni ! his foul is a beam of fire ; it catches in
its red flame the groves. If wide they fpread their wings, as wide
it fpreads its rage. — Morni, come in thy mountain cloud, and be-
hold thy fon. Thy foul was a crowded fl;ream that fwelled and
foamed, when rocks in the narrow path oppofed its courfe ; the
fame fliall be the foul of Gaul. — Evirchoma ! Ogal ! — But lovely
beams mix not with the tempefl: of heaven : they wait till the ftorm
is over. The thoughts of Gaul muft now be of battle. All other
thoughts away. — O that thou wert with me, Ofllan, as in the flirife
of Lathmon ! — But my foul is a fpirit of the ftorm. Dark-eddy-
ing it ruflies, alone, through the troubled deep. It heaves a thou-
fand billows over trembling ifles ; then carelefs rides upon the car
of winds."
The fliield of Morni is fl:ruck again in Ifrona *. No half-con-
fumed, earth-cruft;ed board was this orb then ! Ifrona rocked with
its found, and its thoufands gathered aro\md Gaul. But the fword
of Morni is in the terrible hand of the chief; and, like the green
branches of the forefl:, their ranks are hewn before him. Their
blue
* The condu£l: of Gaul on this occa- Lathmon, and indeed with the manners of
fion may be cenfured as rafli, in drawing the times, which made it difgraceful for
upon himfelf a whole hofl when he was a hero to retire on any pretext whatever,
alone. But as he had before ftruck his The condudl of Ofcar in the /Far o/'C^ro^
fliield, in hopes his friends had been near affords a remarkable inftance of this. The
him, it is probable that he could not great refemblance betwixt Celtic man-
well decline an engagement to which ners and the laws of chivalry in later
himfelf had founded the alarm. — It may times, makes it probable, that the firft
further be obfcrvcd, that the behaviour of had fuggeRed moil of thofe ideas on
Gaul on this occaf.on correfponds very ^^ich the latter were founded,
much with his character in the poem of t ^^