the strength of Macpherson’s Ossian she may have stolen from that vetus et major Scotia, the true home of the Ossianic poetry, Ireland; I make no objection.  But there will still be left in the book a residue with the very soul of the Celtic genius in it, and which has the proud distinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic genius into contact with the genius of the nations of modern Europe, and enriched all our poetry by it.  Woody Morven, and echoing Sora, and Selma with its silent halls!—­we all owe them a debt of gratitude, and when we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse forget us!  Choose any one of the better passages in Macpherson’s Ossian and you can see even at this time of day what an apparition of newness and power such a strain must have been to the eighteenth century:-

’I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate.  The fox looked out from the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round her head.  Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers.  They have but fallen before us, for one day we must fall.  Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days?  Thou lookest from thy towers to-day; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield.  Let the blast of the desert come! we shall be renowned in our day.’

All Europe felt the power of that melancholy; but what I wish to point out is, that no nation of Europe so caught in its poetry the passionate penetrating accent of the Celtic genius, its strain of Titanism, as the English.  Goethe, like Napoleon, felt the spell of Ossian very powerfully, and he quotes a long passage from him in his Werther.  But what is there Celtic, turbulent, and Titanic about the German Werther, that amiable, cultivated, and melancholy young man, having for his sorrow and suicide the perfectly definite motive that Lotte cannot be his?  Faust, again, has nothing unaccountable, defiant and Titanic in him; his knowledge does not bring him the satisfaction he expected from it, and meanwhile he finds himself poor and growing old, and baulked of the palpable enjoyment of life; and here is the motive for Faust’s discontent.  In the most energetic and impetuous of Goethe’s creations,—­his Prometheus,—­it is not Celtic self-will and passion, it is rather the Germanic sense of justice and reason, which revolts against the despotism of Zeus.  The German Sehnsucht itself is a wistful, soft, tearful longing, rather than a struggling, fierce, passionate one.  But the Celtic melancholy is struggling, fierce, passionate; to catch its note, listen to Llywarch Hen in old age, addressing his crutch:-

O my crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the water. flag yellow?  Have I not hated that which I love?

O my crutch! is it not winter-time now, when men talk together after that they have drunken?  Is not the side of my bed left desolate?