This raw and gusty day, and the creaking of the oaks and pines on shore, reminded us of more northern climes than Greece, and more wintry seas than the Aegean.

The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects, of the same stamp with the Iliad itself.  He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and in his era we hear of no other priest than he.  It will not avail to call him a heathen, because he personifies the sun and addresses it; and what if his heroes did “worship the ghosts of their fathers,” their thin, airy, and unsubstantial forms? we worship but the ghosts of our fathers in more substantial forms.  We cannot but respect the vigorous faith of those heathen, who sternly believed somewhat, and are inclined to say to the critics, who are offended by their superstitious rites,—­Don’t interrupt these men’s prayers.  As if we knew more about human life and a God, than the heathen and ancients.  Does English theology contain the recent discoveries!

Ossian reminds us of the most refined and rudest eras, of Homer, Pindar, Isaiah, and the American Indian.  In his poetry, as in Homer’s, only the simplest and most enduring features of humanity are seen, such essential parts of a man as Stonehenge exhibits of a temple; we see the circles of stone, and the upright shaft alone.  The phenomena of life acquire almost an unreal and gigantic size seen through his mists.  Like all older and grander poetry, it is distinguished by the few elements in the lives of its heroes.  They stand on the heath, between the stars and the earth, shrunk to the bones and sinews.  The earth is a boundless plain for their deeds.  They lead such a simple, dry, and everlasting life, as hardly needs depart with the flesh, but is transmitted entire from age to age.  There are but few objects to distract their sight, and their life is as unencumbered as the course of the stars they gaze at.

     “The wrathful kings, on cairns apart,
     Look forward from behind their shields,
     And mark the wandering stars,
     That brilliant westward move.”

It does not cost much for these heroes to live; they do not want much furniture.  They are such forms of men only as can be seen afar through the mist, and have no costume nor dialect, but for language there is the tongue itself, and for costume there are always the skins of beasts and the bark of trees to be had.  They live out their years by the vigor of their constitutions.  They survive storms and the spears of their foes, and perform a few heroic deeds, and then

     “Mounds will answer questions of them,
     For many future years.”

Blind and infirm, they spend the remnant of their days listening to the lays of the bards, and feeling the weapons which laid their enemies low, and when at length they die, by a convulsion of nature, the bard allows us a short and misty glance into futurity, yet as clear, perchance, as their lives had been.  When Mac-Roine was slain,