“His soul departed to his warlike sires,
     To follow misty forms of boars,
     In tempestuous islands bleak.”

The hero’s cairn is erected, and the bard sings a brief significant strain, which will suffice for epitaph and biography.

     “The weak will find his bow in the dwelling,
     The feeble will attempt to bend it.”

Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of luxury.  But the civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era.  It reminds him that civilization does but dress men.  It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet.  It makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin.  Inside the civilized man stand the savage still in the place of honor.  We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans.

The profession of the bard attracted more respect in those days from the importance attached to fame.  It was his province to record the deeds of heroes.  When Ossian hears the traditions of inferior bards, he exclaims,—­

     “I straightway seize the unfutile tales,
     And send them down in faithful verse.”

His philosophy of life is expressed in the opening of the third Duan of Ca-Lodin.

     “Whence have sprung the things that are? 
     And whither roll the passing years? 
     Where does Time conceal its two heads,
     In dense impenetrable gloom,
     Its surface marked with heroes’ deeds alone? 
     I view the generations gone;
     The past appears but dim;
     As objects by the moon’s faint beams,
     Reflected from a distant lake. 
     I see, indeed, the thunderbolts of war,
     But there the unmighty joyless dwell,
     All those who send not down their deeds
     To far, succeeding times.”

The ignoble warriors die and are forgotten;

“Strangers come to build a tower, And throw their ashes overhand; Some rusted swords appear in dust; One, bending forward, says, `The arms belonged to heroes gone; We never heard their praise in song.’”

The grandeur of the similes is another feature which characterizes great poetry.  Ossian seems to speak a gigantic and universal language.  The images and pictures occupy even much space in the landscape, as if they could be seen only from the sides of mountains, and plains with a wide horizon, or across arms of the sea.  The machinery is so massive that it cannot be less than natural.  Oivana says to the spirit of her father, “Gray-haired Torkil of Torne,” seen in the skies,

     “Thou glidest away like receding ships.”

So when the hosts of Fingal and Starne approach to battle,

     “With murmurs loud, like rivers far,
     The race of Torne hither moved.”

And when compelled to retire,