Ossian Collection > Ossian, his principal poems

THE FIVE BARDS. 289
From the hut upon the hill
1"he distant dog doth howl, and still
The stag lies by the mountain rill ;
ceruing this poem, — " It is full of nature, and noble, wild imagina-
tion. Five bards pass the uight at the castle of a chief, himself a
principal bard ; each goes in his turn to observe the face of things,
and returns with an extempore picture of the changes he has seen.
It is an October night, the harvest month of the Highlands. This is
the whole plan, yet there is a contrivance and a preparation of
ideas that you would not expect. The oddest thing is, that every
one of them sees ghosts, more or less. The idea that struck and
surprised me most is the following : — one of them, describing a
storm of wind aud rain, says, —
" Ghosts ride on the tempest this night ;
Pleasant their voice between the gusts of wind ;
Their songs are of other worlds."
Did you never obseiwe that pause, as the gust is recollecting itself,
and rising upon the ear in a shrill aud plaintive note, like the
swell of an JEoUan harp ? There is nothing in the world so like
the voice of a spirit. There is another fine picture in one of them.
It describes the breaking up of the clouds after the storm, before it
is settled into a calm, and when the moon is seen at short intervals :
" The waves are trembling on the lake,
And lash the rocky sides;
The boat is brimful in the cove,
The oars on the roaring tide.
Sad sits a maid beneath a cliff,
And eyes the rolling stream ;
Her lover promised to come,
She saw his boat when it was evening on the lake:
Are these his groans on the gale,
Is this his broken boat on the shore ?"
Gray has written out these sentences in distinct lines, as though
they had been metrically disposed in the original, and not prose.
And indeed it is difficult not to discern a music in them, or
to think they want a music of any other sort. But the effect
would be different in long nompositions.