It is significant that one of Ossian’s most fervent admirers was Chateaubriand, who has been called the inventor of modern melancholy and of the primeval forest.  Here is a passage from his “Genie du Christianisme":[29] “Under a cloudy sky, on the coast of that sea whose tempests were sung by Ossian, their Gothic architecture has something grand and somber.  Seated on a shattered altar in the Orkneys, the traveler is astonished at the dreariness of those places:  sudden fogs, vales where rises the sepulchral stone, streams flowing through wild heaths, a few reddish pine trees, scattered over a naked desert studded with patches of snow; such are the only objects which present themselves to his view.  The wind circulates among the ruins, and their innumerable crevices become so many tubes, which heave a thousand sighs.  Long grasses wave in the apertures of the domes, and beyond these apertures you behold the flitting clouds and the soaring sea-eagle. . .  Long will those four stones which mark the tombs of heroes on the moors of Caledonia, long will they continue to attract the contemplative traveler.  Oscar and Malvina are gone, but nothing is changed in their solitary country.  ’Tis no longer the hand of the bard himself that sweeps the harp; the tones we hear are the slight trembling of the strings, produced by the touch of a spirit, when announcing at night, in a lonely chamber, the death of a hero. . .  So when he sits in the silence of noon in the valley of his breezes is the murmur of the mountain to Ossian’s ear:  the gale drowns it often in its course, but the pleasant sound returns again.”

In Byron’s passion for night and tempest, for the wilderness, the mountains, and the sea, it is of course impossible to say how large a share is attributable directly to MacPherson’s “Ossian,” or more remotely, through Chateaubriand and other inheritors of the Ossianic mood.  The influence of any particular book becomes dispersed and blended with a hundred currents that are in the air.  But I think one has often a consciousness of Ossian in reading such passages as the famous apostrophe to the ocean in “Childe Harold”—­

    “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!”—­

Which recalls the address to the sun in Carthous—­“O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers,”—­perhaps the most hackneyed locus classicus in the entire work; or as the lines beginning,

    “O that the desert were my dwelling place;"[30]

or the description of the storm in the Jura: 

    “And this is in the night:  Most glorious night! 
    Thou wert not sent for slumber.  Let me be
    A sharer in thy fierce and far delight
    A portion of the tempest and of thee."[30]