Ossian Collection > Life and letters of James Macpherson

8 JAMES MACPHERSON.
sound will remain in our fields of war. Our
tombs will be lost in the heath ; the hunter
shall not know the place of our rest."
Such were the mournful tones of this High-
land poetry, as it appeared when it was trans-
lated out of the Gaelic language, and presented
in elegant English by James Maci^herson, a
young student of fair talents and unblemished
character, who had kept a school in the district
of Badenoch, in Inverness-shire, where, by his
own account, fragments of this poetry were com-
monly recited. He spent some of his leisure in
collecting them. By a fortunate chance they
were brought to the notice of certain distin-
guished men in Edinburgh, who received them
at first with astonishment, and then with delight
that poems of such manifest beauty, and, as was
proved by their simple character and the life
which they portrayed, of so great an antiquity,
should have been preserved in the unexplored
regions of their own country. The fragments
that were first published were read with enthu-
siasm ; and Scotchmen everywhere felt that if no
considerable writer had hitherto arisen among
them, they had in Ossian a poet who could rank
with the great masters of the ancient world.