Ossian Collection > Poems of Ossian

ON THE rOEMS OF OSSIAN. 105
the consequences of more profound reflection, and lon-
ger acquaintance witli the arts of thought and of speech.
Ossian, accordingly, almost never expresses himself in
the abstrict. His ideas extended little further than to
the objects he saw around him. A public, a commu-
nity, the universe, were conceptions beyond his sphere.
Even a mountain, a sea, or a lake, which he has occasion
to mention, though only in a simile, are for the most
part particularized ; it is the hill of Cromla, the storm
of the sea of Maimer, or the reeds of the lake of Lego.
A mode of expression which, while it is characteris-
tical of ancient ages, is at the same time highly favora-
ble to descriptive poetry. For the same reasons, per-
sonification is a poetical figure not very common with
Ossian. Inanimate objects, such as winds, trees, flow-
ers, he sometimes personifies with great beauty. But
the personifications which are so familiar to later poets,
of Fame, Time, Terror, Virtue, and the rest of that
class, were unknown to our Celtic bard. These were
modes of conception too abstract for his age.
All these are marks so undoubted, and some of them
too so nice and delicate, of the most early times, as put
the high antiquity of these poems out of question. Es-
pecially when we consider, that if there had been any
imposture in this case, it must have been contrived
and executed in the Highlands of Scotland, two or three
centuries ago ; as up to this period, both by manu-
scripts, and by the testimony of a multitude of living
witnesses, concerning the uncontrovertible tradition of
these poems, they can clearly be traced. Now, this
is a period when that country enjoyed no advantages
for a composition of this kind, which it may not be sup-
posed to have enjoyed in as great, if not in a greater
degree, a thousand years before. To suppose that two
or three hundred years ago, when we well know the
Highlands to have been in a state of gross ignorance