The imaginative element in the character of the Celtic race naturally predisposes them to the reception and retention of fanciful ideas in connection with our relations to the unseen. Keenly sensible of the existence of supernatural influences, they are morbidly curious as to the mode in which they act upon humanity, and ever desirous to propitiate or guard against them. There is something in the presence of the sea and the mountains which fosters a habit of reverie; and the mind, awed and perplexed by the vastness of the forces of Nature, is led to give them an actual and definite embodiment, and to associate them directly with the incidents of our mortal life. Granted the existence of invisible creatures, there is no reason why man, who looks upon the universe as a circle of which he is the centre, should not suppose them to be interested in all that interests himself; and when this is once admitted, it follows as an inevitable result, that he will endeavour to make them the agents of his inclination or his will, unless he fears them as powers whose anger must be reverently deprecated. It will be found that most of the popular superstitions to which we refer are based upon these motives; that most of them originate in the desire to bribe and cajole Fortune, or to command and defeat it. Others will be found to have had their rise, as we have hinted, in the feelings of awe and wonder awakened by the mystery or the grandeur of Nature. The wail of waters against a rocky coast has suggested the cries of the ocean maiden who seeks to lure the mariner to his destruction; the wreathing mists floating in fantastic shapes across the mountain valleys, has peopled their depths with a world of spirits or friendly or inimical to mortals. The imagination, which has been quickened by Nature, proceeds in turn to breathe into Nature a new life. To some of the superstitions which haunt the glens, and peaks, and torrents of the Scottish Highlands, the poet Collins has alluded in one of his most beautiful odes. He speaks of the North as fancy’s land, where still, it is said, the fairy people meet, beneath the shade of the graceful birches, upon mead or hill. To the belief in a tribe of hobgoblins, tiny creatures, visiting the peasant’s hut in the silence of the night, he also refers:-- “There, each trim lass, that skims the milky store, To the swart tribes their creamy bowls allots; By night they sip it round the cottage door, While airy minstrels warble jocund notes.” The malicious disposition of the elves is thus insisted upon:-- “There every herd, by sad experience, knows How, wing’d with fate, their elf-shot arrows fly, When the sick ewe her summer food foregoes, Or, stretch’d on earth, the heart-smit heifers lie.” To superstitions of higher import the poet alludes in the following noble lines:--