The new Ossian had a wonderful mastery of style, rhythmical flow, pathos, and sometimes even sublimity of language, though it can scarcely be said that he represented the realistic force and vivid exactness of the Gaelic he sought to imitate in his English style. Of his _Fragments_, when they appeared, the poet Gray wrote: “I was so struck, so extasié with their infinite beauty, that I writ into Scotland to make a thousand enquiries.” And he adds, “In short, this man is the very demon of poetry, or he has lighted on a treasure hid for ages.” English poets and litterateurs from this time found a new well-spring of inspiration in the ancient Celtic fountain thus wondrously and unexpectedly tapped. And so we find men like Pennant, Dr. Johnson, Boswell, and numerous other interested travellers and historians, making pilgrimages through the Highlands, with the view of observing for themselves the old life surviving there, and of gathering up materials for literary work. Each of the above-named, well known in the pages of English literature, have contributed books which are now classic authorities on the social customs and conditions of the Highlands at the time of their visit, and thus helped to carry a stream of Celtic thought and feeling into the prose of the period, which was afterwards more fully developed by the great magician, Sir Walter Scott. Meanwhile the new elements had entered into the warp and woof of English poetry, and may be traced in all the great masters of the period—Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, Crabbe, Byron, and their numerous contemporaries. Blake was so enthusiastic that he is generally regarded as an imitator of Macpherson, and Southey, going even farther back, edited, with introduction, in 1817, the _Morte d’Arthur_ of Sir Thomas Malory before mentioned. Yet more characteristically Celtic as a poet than all these, because himself an Irishman, was Thomas Moore, author of _Lalla Rookh_, an Indian tale; and _Irish Melodies_. It is with these latter lyrics that we are here most concerned, because they exhibit so much the quality of the Gaelic muse in English verse. Take, for example, the following delightful pieces—euphonious, melancholy, and touching—so full of the Ossianic sadness and Celtic sentiment for the past, and for the dead heroes:— The harp that once through Tara’s halls The soul of music shed, Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls As if that soul were fled. So sleeps the pride of former days, So glory’s thrill is o’er; And hearts that once beat high for praise Now feel that pulse no more!