Mingled with these arguments are passages which quiver with the Gaelic enthusiastic love of nature. In _Finn’s Pastimes_, for example, we have a lyric of extraordinary beauty. After a couple of verses addressed to his opponent, ending, “Can his doom be in hell, in _the house of cold_?” Ossian goes on to tell of his father’s delight in nature. The passage is held to be in the very best style, rhyme, rhythm, and assonance, all combined with a most rich vocabulary of words expressive of sounds, nearly impossible to translate into English. But we quote from Dr. Sigerson’s beautiful rendering of the original:— The tuneful tumult of that bird, The belling deer on ferny steep; This welcome in the dawn he heard, These soothed at eve his sleep. Dear to him the wind-loved heath, The whirr of wings, the rustling brake; Dear the murmuring glens beneath, And sob of Droma’s lake. The cry of hounds at early morn, The pattering deer, the pebbly creek, The cuckoo’s call, the sounding horn, The swooping eagle’s shriek. These Dialogues are quoted at some length, because they bring into clear outline permanent tendencies—the rival influences of naturalism and the Church—Celtic literature struggling to be free, and the Church seeking to saturate it with its own sentiment, and use it solely for its own propaganda. That is the history down to this day. Nature, love, and war on the one side, and religious themes on the other. The one timid of the other, and each on its guard against the undue ascendency of its rival. Thus it is assumed that James Macpherson ignored these ancient compositions, namely, the Dialogues, as modern and counterfeit, because of the intrusion of the ecclesiastical element into the purely pagan domain. Into none of his own so-called translations did he admit any flavour of Christianity, regarding that only as the genuine and original Ossianic residuum which breathed the spirit of pre-Christian times.