Ossian Collection > Literature of the Highlands

6 The Literature of the Highlands
This is the language Nature nursed,
And reared her as a daughter,
The language spoken at the first
By air and earth and water.
In which we hear the roaring sea.
The wind when it rejoices,
The rushes' chant, the river's glee,
The valley's evening voices.
The bards' range of subjects has been greatly extended.
Elegies and eulogies and war-songs, though still dear to the
hearts of the clansmen, are no longer the most natural
themes lor poetry and song. The genius of the people has
awakened to other and wider interests. And since the
Poetry after the Forty-five is mainly lyric, almost every topic
that lends itself to this kind of treatment is from time to
time seized upon by the Celtic bard and made the subject
of song.
Echoes of the old time still linger in the Jacobite pro-
ductions of Alexander Macdonald, Duncan Ban Macintyre,
John Roy Stuart, and Rob Donn, where devotion to the chief
has been transferred in the main to the Prince. Yet there
is a breezy independence about these loyal and patriotic
effusions which shows that the bards were living in a new
time. It was natural that an event full of so much loyalty
to the past, full of romance and stirring adventure, should
appeal powerfully to the spirit of the Gael and enlist his
sympathies. To the enthusiasm thus roused is due that
interesting outburst of Jacobite song which is a feature of
the period, and which anticipated, by more than half a
century, the delightfully plaintive and soul-stirring Stuart
songs of the Lowlands.
More striking, and in some respects more novel, is the
interest taken in Nature. It is true that from ancient times,
as seen in pagan poet and Christian apostle, the Gael
manifested no ordinary delight in, and sympathy with, the
objects and phases of outward nature. In him there
appeared a feeling of kinship with his environment. Nature
was instinct with life reflecting his moods and emotions.