Page:Types of Scenery and Their Influence on Literature.djvu/55
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can fail to recognize how faithfully the innermost spirit of the West Highlands is rendered.
Never before or since have the endless changes of sky and atmosphere been more powerfully portrayed. In the tempestuous climate of the west of Scotland these changes succeed each other with a rapidity and energy such as the dweller on the southern lowlands can hardly realize. They are faithfully, if somewhat monotonously, reflected in 'Ossian.' All through the poems the air seems ever astir around us. Sometimes it is only a gently-breathing zephyr which
Chases round and round
The hoary beard of thistle old,
Dark-moving over grassy mounds[1].
We mark the graves of dead heroes by
Their long grass waving in the wind,
and we move along 'in the robe of the misty glen' past
Branches and brown tufts of grass
Which tremble and whistle in the breeze.
- ↑ The quotations here given are from Dr. Clerk's translation of Macpherson's Gaelic version of the Poems. The question has been much disputed whether his English or Gaelic is the original. There can be no doubt that on the whole the Gaelic is more vivid and accurate in the description of landscape than the more vague and bombastic English of Macpherson. Dr. Clerk, who has given a literal rendering of the Gaelic line for line, remarks:—'I believe that a careful analysis would resolve very much of Ossian's most weird imagery into idealized representations of the ever-varying and truly wonderful aspects of cloud and mist, of sea and mountain, which may be seen by every observant eye in the Highlands, and it is no fancy to say that the perusal of these poems, as we have them, may be well illustrated by travelling a range of the Highland mountains.'—Poems of Ossian, Dissertation, vol. i. p. lxv.
