In outline all these pictures are delineations, which are snappy, strong, manly, abrupt, wild, lively. They are not painted in detail, and their content does not stream forth slowly in regular and measured intervals. Less harsh and wild are they, however, than the songs of the so-called “Northmen,” because Ossian’s soul possesses a charm giving out lonesomeness, love, and gentleness mingled with courage and strength of feeling. The language is crisp, short, true, and exact, and penetrates by its simplicity. A single word literally seizes a whole thought and the two break forth together upon a voice tender and sad. When the singer would exhort his comrades to courage, he painted his pictures through tones that fell upon the ear. In general, Ossian makes us see and hear the living world in scenes that pass quickly, singly, one by one, without arranging themselves in a regular and formal procession. Rough, strong sublimity is their character. The colors which burst upon the eye and the tones which storm the ear come forth without premeditation and polish; the natural outlet of a people to whom nature has given an eye and heart and mind for wild beauty, and in whom manners, customs, and language of civilization have wrought no marring effects. These peoples see and feel, but they do not think and ponder. Here Herder makes spontaneity a child of unwarped nature. THE ANCIENT HEBREWS Herder applies his studies to the Hebrew people as he finds them in their earliest habitations. From his analysis of formative forces and of the peculiar personality resulting from these influences we have what follows: The physical features of the lands with which the Hebrews were familiar were varied enough to give them a rather complete natural history of the earth. They understood the subsiding of water that left mountains above them and valleys in between these. They saw that waters coursed through the valleys and made fertile plains. They knew how springs gush forth from rocks and trees grow on the banks of rivers. They knew both the sea and the desert. The summer sun brought calm waters and the cold winds forged fetters of ice. The palm tree and the cedar, the olive and the grape, grew in these lands. The variety of animals seems to imply a wide and varied expanse of territory. The crane, the turtledove, the eagle, the raven, the stork, the ostrich, the lion, the wild ox, perhaps the elephant and the rhinoceros, as well as most of our common domestic birds and other animals, frequented these environments. Herder conceives of this entire milieu as a world in which the dawn of human life was arising out of dark night, and giving way to the broad daylight in which water and air, earth and sea, mountain and forest, were in the fullest view and most powerful working. The strong contrasts of oriental skies wrought through light and darkness their sharpest outlines.