Beattie had announced the new era of the lyre. The _Minstrel, or the Progress of Genius_ is the picture of the first effects of the muse upon a young bard who is as yet unaware of the inspiration with which he is tossed. Now the future poet goes and sits by the sea-shore during a tempest; again he leaves the village sports to listen in some lonely spot to the distant sound of the pipes. Beattie has run through the entire series of reveries and melancholy ideas of which a hundred other poets have believed themselves the discoverers. Beattie proposed to continue his poem; he did, in fact, write the second canto: Edwin one evening hears a grave voice ascend from the bottom of the valley; it is the voice of a solitary who, after tasting the illusions of the world, has buried himself in that retreat, there to collect his soul and to sing the marvels of the Creator. This hermit instructs the young minstrel and reveals to him the secret of his genius. Beattie was destined to shed tears; the death of his son broke his paternal heart: like Ossian, after the loss of his son Oscar, he hung his harp on the branches of an oak. Perhaps Beattie's son was the young minstrel whom a father had sung and whose footsteps he no longer saw on the mountain. * Lord Byron's verses contain striking imitations of the Minstrel. At the time of my exile in England, Lord Byron was living at Harrow School, in a village ten miles from London. He was a child, I was young and as unknown as he; he had been brought up on the heaths of Scotland, by the sea-side, as I in the marshes of Brittany, by the sea-side; he first loved the Bible and Ossian, as I loved them; he sang the memories of his childhood in Newstead Abbey, as I sang mine in Combourg Castle: When I roved a young Highlander o'er the dark heath. And climb'd thy steep summit, O Morven of snow! To gaze on the torrent that thunder'd beneath, Or the mist of the tempest that gather'd below[305]. In my wanderings in the neighbourhood of London, when I was so unhappy, I passed through the village of Harrow a score of times, without suspecting the genius it contained. I have sat in the churchyard at the foot of the elm beneath which, in 1807, Lord Byron wrote these verses, at the time when I was returning from Palestine: