Ossian Collection > Life and letters of James Macpherson

OSSIAN. 5
and the songs and ballads which immemorial
tradition assigned to him were treasured with
peculiar care. The office of the bard, like that
of his chief, was hereditary ; the poetry which
he had learned from his father, he taught in
turn to his son ; and thus he came to believe
that Ossian was the fount and origin of all
bardic inspiration ; and that the best of the
poems to be found in the Highlands had been
composed by this great poet in an unknown
antiquity.
As we see him in the old songs, sitting alone
in his blindness, and filled with the remem-
brance of the friends whom he soon must follow,
Ossian is certainly a figure that stirs the heart.
" Happy are those," he murmurs, " who die in
their youth, in the midst of their renown ; they
have not beheld the tombs of their friends, or
ft\iled to bend the bow of their strength." As
for him, he is the voice of an age that is past.
He recalls in his solitude the words of brother-
bards in the days of song : —
" When bards are removed to their place ;
when harps are hung in Selma's hall ; then conies
a voice to Ossian, and awakes his soul ! It is
the voice of years that are gone ! they roll before
me, with all their deeds ! "