“It was now the period when Ossian, that poet of the genius of ruins and battles, reigned paramount in the imagination of France. Baour-Lormian had translated him into sonorous verse for the camp of the emperor. Women sung him in plaintive romances, or in triumphal strains, at the departure, above the tomb, or on the return of their lovers. Small editions in portable volumes had found their way into all the libraries. One of them fell into my hands. I plunged into this ocean of shadow, of blood, of tears, of phantoms, of foam, of snow, of fogs, of hoar frosts, and of images, the immensity, the dimness, and the melancholy of which harmonise so well with the lofty sadness of a heart of sixteen which expands to the first rays of the Infinite. Ossian, his localities, and his images harmonised wonderfully also with the nature of the mountain district, almost Scottish in its character, with the season of the year, and with the melancholy aspect of the places where I read him. It was during the biting blasts of November and December. The earth was covered with a mantle of snow, pierced here and there by the black trunks of scattered pines, or overhung by the naked and branching arms of the oaks, upon which flights of crows assembled, filling the air with their coarse cawings. Icy fogs clothed the branches with hoar frost, clouds swept in eddying wreaths around the buried peaks of the mountains. A few streams of sunshine streamed for a moment through their openings, and discovered distant perspective of unfathomable valleys, which the eye might fancy gulfs of the sea. It was the natural and sublime exposition of the poems of Ossian which I held in my hand. I carried him in my hunting pouch over the mountains, and while the dogs made the deep gorges of the hills echo with their barking, I read his pages, sitting beneath the shelter of some overhanging rock, only raising my eyes from its pages to find again, floating along the horizon or outstretched at my feet, the same mists, the same clouds, the same plains of ice or snow which I had just beheld in imagination. How often have I felt my tears congealing on the borders of my eyelids! I had become one of the sons of the bard, one of the heroic, amorous, or plaintive shades who fought, who loved, who wept, or who swept the fingers across the harp in the gloomy domains of Fingal.” In Italy the influence of Ossian was supreme. Cesarotti tells us that he became the founder of a school of poetry there. Throughout the literary world the power of Ossian’s muse was felt. The artificiality, hollowness, and conventionality of the last quarter of the eighteenth century rendered the natural echoes of the grand old voice of Cona a fresh music and a welcome relief.