Ossian Collection > Poems of Ossian, the son of Fingal > Volume 2

1'30 TEivicRA: Boojcll.
trengtli of Crothar : He rolled the foe from Alneema,
and returned, midst the joy of Con-lama.
*' Battle on battle cnmes. Blood is poured on blood.
The tombs of the valiant rise. Erin's clouds are hung
Tound with ghosts. The chiefs of the south gathered
round tlie echoing shield of Crothar. He came with
death to the paths of the foe. The virgins wept, by
the streams of UUin. They looked to the mist of the
hill, no hunter descended from its folds. Silence dark-
■ened in the land : blasts sighed lonely on grass v tombs.
" Descending like the eagk of heaven, with all his
rustling wings, when he forsakes the blast with joy,
the son of Trenmor came ; Conar, arm of death, from
Morven of the groves. He poured his might along
green Erin. Death dimly strode behind his sword.
The sons of Bolga fled from his course, as from a stream,
that bursting from the stormy desert, rolls the fields to-
gether with all their echoing woods. Crothar f met
him in battle : but Alnecma's v/arriors fled. The king
of Atha slowly retired, in the grief of his soul. He,
afterwards shone in the south ; but dim as the sun of
autumn, when he visits, in his robes of mist, Lara of
<lark streams. The v/ithcred grass is covered with dew:
the field, though bright, is sad."
" Why wakes the bard before me,'' said Cathmor,
" the memory of those who fled ? Has some ghost, from
his dusky cloud, bent forward to thine ear ; to frighten
Cad:imor from the field with the tales of old ? Dwellers
f The delicacy of the hard, with regard to Crothar, is rernarkablc.
As he wris the ancestor of C;4thmor, to whom the epi-ode is address-
ed, the b-rd softens liis defeat, by only mentioning thnt his people
ficd. Cathmrr took the song of Fonar in an unfavourable lipht.
The hards, being of tlie order of tlie dnnds, who pretended to a fore-
knowledge of events, were supposed to have supernatural prescience
of futurity. The king thought, that the choice of Fonar's song
proceeded from his fonseing the Tinfortunate issue cf the war; anJ
that his own fate was shadowed out, in that cf his ancestor Crothar.
'i"»>e attitude of the hard, after tlie reprimand of his patron, is pictu-
resque and affecting. Weadmirethespeech of Cathmor, but lameat
the effect it has on the feeling soul of the good old pcct.