Hold thou back, O thou wind! from the mountain, Let their image a moment stay; Nor sweep with thy skirts from our eyesight, Nor scatter their beauty away. O’er the glen of the rushes, the hill of the hinds With the vague wandering vapour they go; O, Bard of the times that have left us! Aught of their life cans’t thou show? OSSIAN’S REPLY. The years that have been they come back as ye speak, To my soul in their music they glide; Like the murmur of waves in the far inland calm, Is their soft and smooth step by my side. The translation is from “The Gaelic Bards.” Let us now glance at a particular class of popular pieces that have become mixed up with the suspected works of Macpherson and Smith. The original of the specimens which follow was well known before Macpherson’s Gaelic Ossian appeared. The famous “Address to the Sun” is found in English in Macpherson’s _Carthon_. In the published Gaelic of 1807 its place is marked by asterisks. The Gaelic is inserted to correspond with the English in Clerk’s edition. A new literal translation is here attempted:— O, thou that glidest in the sky, Round as the hero’s full hard shield, Thy frownless lustre, whence on high? Sun, whence thy ceaseless light revealed? Thou comest in thy lovely might; The stars conceal from us their motion; The moon pale hies from heaven’s height, And shrouds her in the western ocean. Thou in thy distance art alone; Who bold may dare approach thy might; With age, cairn, cliff, are overthrown; With age the oak falls from the height. The ocean shakes with ebb and flow; The moon is lost in depth of night; But, Victor, thou alone dost glow In endless joy of thine own light. When tempests darken round the earth With lightning, and with hoarse-voiced thunder, Fair through the storm thou look’st in mirth Upon the troubled heavens under. But vain to me are thy bright rays, Since I must see no more thy glance Gold-tressed that turns on eastern gaze Of heaven’s cloudy countenance, When thou art trembling in the west, Through ocean’s dusky doors to rest. But like myself thou art perchance— Once robed with weakness, once with strength; In circling sky our years advance Together to one end at length; Rejoice, O Sun, while thou art young; Be glad, thou Prince! while thou art strong! Old age is dark and void of mirth, Like faint moon ere her horn she fills; While looking from the clouds on earth Where hoary mist skirts cairny hills. The biting blast with breath of cold Beats on the traveller weak and old.