'O do not, do not, holy friar, 'And now, alas! for thy sad loss I'll evermore weep and sigh; For thee I only wished to live, For thee I wish to die.' 'Weep no more, lady, weep no more; Thy sorrow is in vain : For violets plucked, the sweetest shower Will ne'er make grow again. 'Our joys as winged dreams do fly; Why then should sorrow last? Since grief but aggravates thy loss, Grieve not for what is past.' 'O say not so, thou holy friar! I pray thee say not so; For since my true love died for me, 'Tis meet my tears should flow. 'And will he never come again- Will he ne'er come again? Ah, no! he is dead, and laid in his grave, For ever to remain. 'His cheek was redder than the rose The comeliest youth was he; But he is dead and laid in his grave, Alas! and woe is me.' 'Sigh no more, lady, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever; One foot on sea, and one on land, To one thing constant never. 'Hadst thou been fond, he had been false, And left thee sad and heavy; For young men ever were fickle found, 'Now say not so, thou holy friar, I pray thee say not so; My love he had the truest heart O he was ever true! 'And art thou dead, thou much-loved youth? And didst thou die for me? Then farewell home; for evermore A pilgrim I will be. 'But first upon my true love's grave My weary limbs I'll lay, And thrice I'll kiss the green grass turf That wraps his breathless clay.' 'Yet stay, fair lady, rest a while Beneath this cloister wall; The cold wind through the hawthorn blows, And drizzly rain doth fall.' 'O stay me not, thou holy friar, 'Yet stay, fair lady, turn again, And dry those pearly tears; For see, beneath this gown of gray, Macpherson is inseparably connected. They stand, as liberty does with reason, Twinned, and from her hath no dividual being. Time and a better taste have abated the pleasure with which these productions were once read; but poems which engrossed so much attention, which were translated into many different languages, which were hailed with delight by Gray, by David Hume, John Home, and other eminent persons, and which, in a bad Italian translation, formed the favourite reading of Napoleon, cannot be considered as unworthy of notice. JAMES MACPHERSON was born at Kingussie, a village in Inverness-shire, on the road northwards from Perth, in 1738. He was intended for the church, and received the necessary education at Aberdeen. At the age of twenty, he published a As this ballad resembles Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina, it is but right to mention that Goldsmith (as Percy has stated) contradistinction to that coldly correct and sentimental style which pervaded part of our literature. The influence of Percy's collection was general and extensive. It is evident in many contemporary authors. It gave the first impulse to the genius of Sir Walter Scott; and it may be seen in the writings of Coleridge and Wordsworth. A fresh fountain of poetry was opened up-a spring of sweet, tender, and heroic thoughts and imaginations, which could never be again turned back into the artificial channels in which the genius of poesy had been too long and too closely confined. Percy was himself a poet. His ballad, O Nancy, wilt thou go with Me? the Hermit of Warkworth, and other detached pieces, evince both taste and talent. We subjoin a cento, The Friar of Orders Gray, which Percy says he compiled from fragments of ancient ballads, to which he added supplemental stanzas to connect them together. The greater part, however, is his own, and it must be admitted that he was too prone to tamper with the old ballads. Dr Percy was born at Bridgnorth, Shropshire, in 1728, and was successively chaplain to the king, dean of Carlisle, and bishop of Dromore: the latter dignity The Deanery, Carlisle. he possessed from 1782 till his death in 1811. He enjoyed the friendship of Johnson, Goldsmith, and other distinguished men of his day, and lived long enough to hail the genius of Sir Walter Scott. O Nancy, wilt thou go with Me?* O Nancy, wilt thou go with me, Nor sigh to leave the flaunting town? Can silent glens have charms for thee, The lowly cot and russet gown? No longer drest in silken sheen, No longer decked with jewels rare, Say, canst thou quit each courtly scene, Where thou wert fairest of the fair? From Dodsley's Collection of Poems, 1758. In Johnson's Musical Museum it is printed as a Scottish production. It is too barefaced,' says Burns, to take Dr Percy's charming song, and, by means of transposing a few English words into Scots, to offer to pass it for a Scots song.' O Nancy, when thou'rt far away, O Nancy, canst thou love so true, Through perils keen with me to go? Or, when thy swain mishap shall rue, To share with him the pang of woe? Say, should disease or pain befall, Wilt thou assume the nurse's care, Nor, wistful, those gay scenes recall, Where thou wert fairest of the fair? And when at last thy love shall die, Wilt thou receive his parting breath? Wilt thou repress each struggling sigh, And cheer with smiles the bed of death? And wilt thou o'er his breathless clay Strew flowers, and drop the tender tear? Nor then regret those scenes so gay, Where thou wert fairest of the fair? 'O lady, he is dead and gone! Lady, he's dead and gone! At his head a green grass turf, And at his heels a stone. 'Within these holy cloisters long He languished, and he died, Lamenting of a lady's love, And 'plaining of her pride. 'Here bore him barefaced on his bier 'And art thou dead, thou gentle youth- 'O weep not, lady, weep not so, 'O do not, do not, holy friar, My sorrow now reprove; For I have lost the sweetest youth That e'er won lady's love. 'And now, alas! for thy sad loss I'll evermore weep and sigh; For thee I only wished to live, For thee I wish to die.' 'Weep no more, lady, weep no more; Thy sorrow is in vain: For violets plucked, the sweetest shower Will ne'er make grow again. "Our joys as winged dreams do fly; Why then should sorrow last? Since grief but aggravates thy loss, Grieve not for what is past.' 'O say not so, thou holy friar! I pray thee say not so; For since my true love died for me, 'Tis meet my tears should flow. 'And will he never come again- Will he ne'er come again? Ah, no! he is dead, and laid in his grave, For ever to remain. 'His cheek was redder than the rose The comeliest youth was he; But he is dead and laid in his grave, Alas! and woe is me.' 'Sigh no more, lady, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever; One foot on sea, and one on land, To one thing constant never. 'Hadst thou been fond, he had been false, And left thee sad and heavy; For young men ever were fickle found, 'Now say not so, thou holy friar, I pray thee say not so; My love he had the truest heart O he was ever true! 'And art thou dead, thou much-loved youth? And didst thou die for me? Then farewell home; for evermore A pilgrim I will be. 'But first upon my true love's grave And thrice I'll kiss the green grass turf 'Yet stay, fair lady, rest a while Beneath this cloister wall; The cold wind through the hawthorn blows, And drizzly rain doth fall.' 'O stay me not, thou holy friar, 'Yet stay, fair lady, turn again, And dry those pearly tears; For see, beneath this gown of gray, Macpherson is inseparably connected. They stand, as liberty does with reason, Twinned, and from her hath no dividual being. Time and a better taste have abated the pleasure with which these productions were once read; but poems which engrossed so much attention, which were translated into many different languages, which were hailed with delight by Gray, by David Hume, John Home, and other eminent persons, and which, in a bad Italian translation, formed the favourite reading of Napoleon, cannot be considered as unworthy of notice. JAMES MACPHERSON was born at Kingussie, a village in Inverness-shire, on the road northwards from Perth, in 1738. He was intended for the church, and received the necessary education at Aberdeen. At the age of twenty, he published a As this ballad resembles Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina, it is but right to mention that Goldsmith (as Percy has stated) heroic poem, in six cantos, entitled The Highlander, estate. The eagerness of Macpherson for posthuwhich at once proved his ambition and his inca-mous distinction was seen by some of the bequests pacity. It is a miserable production. For a short of his will. He ordered that his body should be time Macpherson taught the school of Ruthven, interred in Westminster Abbey, and that a sum of near his native place, whence he was glad to £300 should be laid out in erecting a monument remove as tutor in the family of Mr Graham of to his memory in some conspicuous situation at Balgowan. While attending his pupil (afterwards Belleville. Both injunctions were duly fulfilled; Lord Lynedoch) at the spa of Moffat, he became the body was interred in Poets' Corner, and a acquainted, in the autumn of 1759, with Mr John marble obelisk, containing a medallion portrait of Home, the author of Douglas, to whom he shewed the poet, may be seen gleaming amidst a clump of what he represented as translations of some frag- trees by the roadside near Kingussie. ments of ancient Gaelic poetry, which he said were The fierce controversy which raged for some time still floating in the Highlands. He stated that it as to the authenticity of the poems of Ossian, the was one of the favourite amusements of his country-incredulity of Johnson, and the obstinate silence of men to listen to the tales and compositions of their Macpherson, are circumstances well known. There ancient bards, and he described these fragments as seems to be no doubt that a great body of tradifull of pathos and poetical imagery. Under the tional poetry was floating over the Highlands, which patronage of Mr Home's friends-Blair, Carlyle, Macpherson collected and wrought up into regular and Fergusson-Macpherson published next year poems. It would seem also that Gaelic manuscripts a small volume of sixty pages, entitled Fragments were in existence, which he received from different of Ancient Poetry; translated from the Gaelic or families to aid in his translation. One of these Erse Language. The publication attracted general has been preserved in the Advocates' Library, attention, and a subscription was made to enable Edinburgh. It refers to a dialogue between Ossian Macpherson to make a tour in the Highlands to and St Patrick on Christianity-a fact which collect other pieces. His journey proved to be Macpherson suppressed, as his object was to reprehighly successful! In 1762 he presented the world sent the poems as some centuries older. The Irish with Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books; antiquaries have published many of these Celtic and in 1763, Temora, another epic poem, in eight fragments, and they appear to have established a books. The sale of these works was immense. good claim to Ossian. The poetry was common The possibility that, in the third or fourth century, equally in Ireland and in the Highlands of Scotamong the wild remote mountains of Scotland, land, varied to suit localities, or according to the there existed a people exhibiting all the high and taste, knowledge, and abilities of the reciter. The chivalrous feelings of refined valour, generosity, people, the language, and the legends were the magnanimity, and virtue, was eminently calculated same in both countries. How much of the pubto excite astonishment; while the idea of the poems lished work is ancient, and how much fabricated, being handed down by tradition through so many cannot now be ascertained. The Highland Society centuries among rude, savage, and barbarous tribes, instituted a regular inquiry into the subject; and was no less astounding. Many doubted-others dis- in their report, the committee state that they believed-but a still greater number indulged the have not been able to obtain any one poem the pleasing supposition that Fingal fought and Ossian same in title and tenor with the poems published.' sang.' Macpherson realised £1200, it is said, by Detached passages, the names of characters and these productions. In 1764 the poet accompanied places, with some of the wild imagery characteristic Governor Johnston to Pensacola as his secretary, of the country, and of the attributes of Celtic but quarrelling with his patron, he returned, and imagination, undoubtedly existed. The ancient fixed his residence in London. He became one of tribes of the Celts had their regular bards, even the literary supporters of the administration, pub- down to a comparatively late period. A people lished some historical works, and was a popular like the natives of the Highlands, leading an idle pamphleteer. In 1773 he published a translation inactive life, and doomed from their climate to a of the Iliad in the same style of poetical prose as severe protracted winter, were also well adapted Ossian, which was a complete failure, unless as a to transmit from one generation to another the source of ridicule and personal opprobrium to the fragments of ancient song which had beguiled translator. He was more successful as a politician. their infancy and youth, and which flattered their A pamphlet of his in defence of the taxation of love of their ancestors. No person, however, now America, and another on the opposition in parlia- believes that Macpherson found entire epic poems ment in 1779, were much applauded. He attempted, in the Highlands. The original materials were as we have seen from his manuscripts, to combat probably as scanty as those on which Shakspeare the Letters of Junius, writing under the signatures founded the marvellous superstructures of his of 'Musæus,' 'Scævola,' &c. He was appointed genius; and he himself has not scrupled to state, agent for the Nabob of Arcot, and obtained a seat in the preface to his last edition of Ossian, that ‘a in parliament as representative for the borough of translator who cannot equal his original is incapable Camelford. It does not appear, however, that, with of expressing its beauties.' Sir James Mackintosh all his ambition and political zeal, Macpherson ever has suggested, as a supposition countenanced by attempted to speak in the House of Commons. In many circumstances, that, after enjoying the 1789 the poet, having realised a handsome fortune, pleasure of duping so many critics, Macpherson purchased the property of Raitts, in his native intended one day to claim the poems as his own. parish, and having changed its name to the more 'If he had such a design, considerable obstacles to euphonious and sounding one of Belleville, he built its execution arose around him. He was loaded upon it a splendid residence designed by the Adelphi with so much praise, that he seemed bound_in Adams, in the style of an Italian villa, in which he honour to his admirers not to desert them. The hoped to spend an old age of ease and dignity. He support of his own country appeared to render died at Belleville on the 17th of February 1796, adherence to those poems, which Scotland inconleaving a handsome fortune, which is still enjoyed siderately sanctioned, a sort of national obligation. by his family. His eldest daughter, Miss Mac- Exasperated, on the other hand, by the perhaps pherson, is at present (1858) proprietrix of the unduly vehement, and sometimes very coarse attacks made on him, he was unwilling to surrender to such opponents. He involved himself at last so deeply, as to leave him no decent retreat.' A somewhat sudden and premature death closed the scene on Macpherson; nor is there among the papers which he left behind him a single line that throws any light upon the controversy. Mr Wordsworth has condemned the imagery of Ossian as spurious. 'In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness. In Macpherson's work it is exactly the reverse; everything, that is not stolen, is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened-yet nothing distinct. It will always be so when words are substituted for things.' Part of this censure may perhaps be owing to the style and diction of Macpherson, which have a broken abrupt appearance and sound. The imagery is drawn from the natural appearances of a rude mountainous country. The grass of the rock, the flower of the heath, the thistle with its beard, are, as Blair observes, the chief ornaments of his landscapes. The desert, with all its woods and deer, was enough for Fingal. We suspect it is the sameness-the perpetual recurrence of the same images-which fatigues the reader, and gives a misty confusion to the objects and incidents of the poem. That there is something poetical and striking in Ossian-a wild solitary magnificence, pathos, and tenderness -is undeniable. The Desolation of Balclutha, and the lamentations in the Song of Selma, are conceived with true feeling and poetical power. The battles of the car-borne heroes are, we confess, much less to our taste, and seem stilted and unnatural. They are like the Quixotic encounters of knightly romance, and want the air of remote antiquity, of dim and solitary grandeur, and of shadowy superstitious fear, which shrouds the wild heaths, lakes, and mountains, of Ossian. [Ossian's Address to the Sun.] I feel the sun, O Malvina! leave me to my rest. Perhaps they may come to my dreams; I think I hear a feeble voice! The beam of heaven delights to shine on the grave of Carthon: I feel it warm around. O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers! Whence are thy beams, O sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty; the stars hide themselves in the sky; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave; but thou thyself movest alone. Who can be a companion of thy course? The oaks of the mountains fall; the mountains themselves decay with years; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon herself is lost in heaven, but thou art for ever the same, rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. When the world is dark with tempests, when thunder rolls and lightning flies, thou lookest in thy beauty from the clouds, and laughest at the storm. But to Ossian thou lookest in vain, for he beholds thy beams no more; whether thy yellow hair flows on the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west. But thou art perhaps like me for a season; thy years will have an end. Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds careless of the voice of the morning. Exult, then, O sun, in the strength of thy youth! Age is dark and unlovely; it is like the glimmering light of the moon when it shines through broken clouds, and the mist is on the hills: the blast of the north is on the plain; the traveller shrinks in the midst of his journey. [Fingal's Airy Hall.] His friends sit around the king, on mist! They hear the songs of Ullin: he strikes the half-viewless harp. He raises the feeble voice. The lesser heroes, with a thousand meteors, light the airy hall. Malvina rises in the midst; a blush is on her cheek. She beholds the unknown faces of her fathers. She turns aside her humid eyes. Art thou come so soon?' said Fingal, daughter of generous Toscar. Sadness dwells in the halls of Lutha. My aged son is sad! I hear the breeze of Cona, that was wont to lift thy heavy locks. It comes to the hall, but thou art not there. Its voice is mournful among the arms of thy fathers! Go, with thy rustling wing, O breeze! sigh on Malvina's tomb. It rises yonder beneath the rock, at the blue stream of Lutha. The maids are departed to their place. Thou alone, O breeze, mournest there!' [Address to the Moon.] The Daughter of heaven, fair art thou! the silence of thy face is pleasant! Thou comest forth in loveliness. The stars attend thy blue course in the east. clouds rejoice in thy presence, O moon! they brighten their dark-brown sides. Who is like thee in heaven, light of the silent night? The stars are ashamed in thy presence. They turn away their sparkling eyes. Whither dost thou retire from thy course, when the darkness of thy countenance grows? hast thou thy hall, like Ossian? dwellest thou in the shadow of grief? have thy sisters fallen from heaven? are they who rejoiced with thee, at night, no more? Yes, they have fallen, fair light! and thou dost often retire to mourn. But thou thyself shalt fail, one night, and leave thy blue path in heaven. The stars will then lift will rejoice. Thou art now clothed with thy brightness. their heads they, who were ashamed in thy presence, Look from thy gates in the sky. Burst the cloud, O wind! that the daughter of night may look forth! that the shaggy mountains may brighten, and the ocean roll its white waves in light. [Desolation of Balclutha.] I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate. The fire had resounded in the halls; and the voice of the people is heard no more. The stream of Clutha was removed from its place by the fall of the walls. The thistle shook there its lonely head; the moss whistled to the wind. The fox looked out from the windows; the rank grass of the wall waved round its head. Desolate is the dwelling of Moina; silence is in the house of her fathers. 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. And let the blast of the desert come! we shall be renowned in our day! The mark of my arm shall be in battle; my name in the song of bards. Raise the song, send round the shell: let joy be heard in my hall. When thou, sun of heaven, shalt fail! if thou shalt fail, thou mighty light! if thy brightness is but for a season, like Fingal, our fame shall survive thy beams. Such was the song of Fingal in the day of his joy. [A Description of Female Beauty.] hall of her secret sigh. She came in all her beauty, The daughter of the snow overheard, and left the like the moon from the cloud of the east. Loveliness was around her as light. Her steps were like the music of songs. She saw the youth and loved him. He was the stolen sigh of her soul. Her blue eyes rolled on him in secret; and she blest the chief of Morven. |