Ossian Collection > Poems of Ossian

A PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE. xvii
perfect, and more corrupted, than the poems which
they had formerly heard, or which might have been
obtained at an earlier period. •
Several collections came to them, by presents, as
well as by purchase, and in these are numeroas
"shreds and patches,'' that bear a strong resemblance
to the materials of which " Ossian's Poems" are com-
posed. These are of various degrees of consequence.
One of them we are the more tempted to give, for
the same reason as the Committee was the more soli-
citous to procure it, because it was one which some
of the opposers of the authenticity of Ossian bad
quoted as evidently spurious, betraying the most con-
vincing marks of its being a close imitation of the
Address to the Sun in Milton.
" I got," says IMr. Mac Diarraid,+ " the copy of
these poems," (Ossian's Address to the Sun in Car-
thon, and a similar address in Carrickthura)
" about thirty years ago, from an old man in Glen-
lyon. I took it, and several other fragments, now, I
fear, irrecoverably lost, from the man's mouth. He
had learnt them in his youth from people in the same
glen, which mnst have been long before Macpherson
was born."
Literal translation of Ossian's Address to the
Sun in Carthon.
" I thou who travellest above, round as the full-
orbed hard shield of the mighty! whence is thy
brightness without frown, thy light that is lasting, O
sun? Thou comest forth in thy powerful beauty, and
the stars hide their course; the moon, without strength
goes from the sky, hiding herself nuder a wave in the
west. Thou art in thy journey alone; who is so bold
as to come nigh thee? The oak falleth from the high
mountain ; ihe rock and the precipice fall under old
age; the ocean ebbeth and floweth, the moon is lost
above in the sky ; but thou alone for ever in victory,
in the rejoicing of thy own light. When the storm
• See Report. t Date, April 9, 1801, p. 71.