Tribes were beginning to assume a national cast, and as organised nations to develop an individuality. They were preparing to run the race sketched out to them by destiny, the path of each bounded by a particular line or limit of sea, stream, mountain, or valley, and were throwing aside all the encumbrances of superseded customs and laws that might clog their progress. Fingal and his followers appeared in immortal brilliance, crowned with the laurels of deathless heroism on the stage of the world, and soon they disappeared from the scene. They were seen but for a short time like the sun in a wintry day. And the picture is beautifully brought before us in the following verses translated by Pattison:— “Like a sun-gleam in wild wintry weather That hastens o’er Lena’s wide heath, So the Féinne have faded together, They were the beam the showery clouds sheathe, When down stoops the dark rain-frown of heaven, To snatch from the hunter the ray, And wildly the moaning bare branches are driven, While the weak herbs all wither away. “But the sun, in his strength yet returning, The fair-freshened woods will espy, In the springtime that laugh for their mourning, As they look on the Son of the sky, Kindly unveilling his lustre, Through the soft and the drizzling shower, All their wan heads again will he muster, From their drear and their wintry bower. “Then with joy will their small buds keep swelling; Not so they who sleep in the tomb— No sunbeam that darkness dispelling, Shall waken them up from their gloom.” Ossian, the blind warrior-poet, survives them all. And now, as he muses on the departure of his kindred heroes and hunters, and on the loneliness of his own state, led by the white-armed Malvina, the betrothed of his fallen son Oscar, he seeks their former haunts, and breathes as he rests in the well-known shades the pathetic lamentation, “the last of my race!” “Chula tu bàrda nam fonn: ’S taitneach, ach trom do ghuth; ’S taitneach a Mhalmhìne nan sonn; Leaghaidh bròn am bochd an am tha dubh.” _Croma._ From the picture of Ossian in his shadowy Pagan domain it is refreshing to turn to those names which have played a great part in connection with our earliest Christian civilization and literature. They are the names of Patrick of Strathclyde, Bridget of the South Gaels of Albin, and Columba of Donegal, subsequently of Iona.