Ossian Collection > Poems of Ossian > Volume 1

70 COLNA-DONA Z
ma's race have failed ! Prone from the stormy
night, the traveller shall lay him by thy side : thy
whistling moss shall sound in his dreams ; the
years that were past shall return. Battles rise
before him, blue-shielded kings descend to war :
the darkened moon looks from heaven on the
troubled field. lie shall burst with morning from
dreams, and see the tombs of warriors round. He
shall ask about the stone, and the aged shall re-
ply, '' This grey stone was raised by Ossian, a
chief of other years'."
From * Col-amon came a bard, from Carul,
the friend of strangers, lie bade us to the feast
of kings, to the dwelling of bright Colna-dona.
We went to the hall of harps. There Car-iil
brightened between his aged locks, when he beheld
the sons of his friends, like two young branches
before him.
"• Sons of the mighty," he said, " yc bring
" back the days of old, when first I descended
* The manners of the Britons and Caledonians were so
similar in the days of Ossian, that there can be no doubt
that they were originally thf^ same people, and descended
from those Gauls who first possessed themselves of South
Brtiain, and gradually migrated to the North, This hy-
pothesis is more rational than the idle fables of ill-formed
senachies, who biing the Caledonians from distant countries.
The bare opinion of Tacitus (which by-the-bye was only
founded on a similarity of the personal figure of the Cale-
donians to the Germans of his own time), though it has
staggered some learned men, is not sufficient to make us be-
lieve that the ancient inhabitants cf North Britain were a
German colony. A discu>sion of a point like this might be
curious, but could never be satisfactory. Periods so distant
are so involved in obscurity, that nothing certain can be now
advanced concerning them. The light which the Roman
writers hold forth is too feeble to guide us to the truth,
through the darkness which has surrounded it.