"He shall _not_ die," says Toby, with an oath--which oath, says Sterne, the recording angel washed away, so soon as it was uttered. The Rev. Laurence Sterne, it is to be feared, counted too largely upon the swash of such tender recording angels. Only a host of them, with best lachrymal equipment, could float away poor Sterne's misdeeds! We touched upon the sad life and fate of the marvellous boy, Chatterton--not a great poet, but with an exuberant poetic glow within him which gave new brightness to old Romanticism, and {221} which kindled in after days many a fancy into flame--up and down the pages of later and bolder poets. Were his forgeries perhaps instigated by the Ossianic mystification? _Macpherson and other Scots._ [Sidenote: James Macpherson.] I do not know if you have ever encountered the poems of Ossian. They are out of fashion now; I doubt if fragments even get into the school-books; but some of my readers may remember in a corner of the art-gallery of Yale University a painting, with two life-size figures in it, by Colonel John Trumbull--a limp and bleeding, and somewhat dainty warrior, leaning upon the shoulder of a flax-haired maiden; with a little strain from Ossian's Fingal, in the placard below, to tell the story. The mighty Lamderg (who is the warrior) died: and Gelchossa (the flax-haired young woman) "mourned three days beside her love. The hunters found her dead." The picture is, I suspect, almost the only permanent mark in America of the amazing popularity which once belonged to the strange, weird, monotonous, gloomy, {222} thin poems of Ossian. There are descriptions of mountain crags in them, and of splintered pines, of thunder blasts and of ocean hoar; and there are crags again, and bleeding warriors, and flax-haired women; harps, moonlight, broken clouds, and crags again: I cite a few fragments: "The oaks of the mountains fall; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon herself is lost in heaven; but thou art forever 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. ... "Rise, moon, from behind thy clouds! Stars of the night arise, lead me, some light, to the place where my love rests from the chase alone--his bow near him unstrung; his dogs panting around him. The stream and the wind roar aloud, I hear not the voice of my love." [Sidenote: Poems of Ossian.]