The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875

o joy in your wing to Ossian!'" "The poet Gray, too," says Wilson, "frequently in his Letters expresses his wonder and delight in the beautiful and glorious inspirations of the Son of the Mist." Even Malcolm Laing--Macpherson's most inveterate foe--who edited Ossian for the sole purpose of revenge, exposure, and posthumous dissection, is compelled to say that "Macpherson's genius is equal to that of any poet of his day, except perhaps Gray."

In another place (Bards of the Bible--'Jeremiah') we have thus spoken of Ossian:--"We are reminded [by Jeremiah] of the 'Harp of Selma,' and of blind Ossian sitting amid the evening sunshine of the Highland valley, and in tremulous, yet aspiring notes, telling to his small silent and weeping circle, the tale of--

"Old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago."

"It has become fashionable (through Macaulay chiefly) to abuse the Poems of Ossian; but, admitting their forgery as well as faultiness, they seem to us in their better passages to