All this, perhaps,
tends to heighten the effect by the bold intermixture of realities,
and by an appeal, as it were, to the individual knowledge and experience
of the reader. He affords few subjects for picture. There is, indeed,
one gigantic one, that of Count Ugolino, of which Michael Angelo made
a basrelief, and which Sir Joshua Reynolds ought not to have painted.
Another writer whom I shall mention last, and whom I cannot persuade
myself to think a mere modern in the groundwork, is Ossian. He is a
feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his
readers. As Homer is the first vigour and lustihead, Ossian is the
decay and old age of poetry. He lives only in the recollection and
regret of the past. There is one impression which he conveys more
entirely than all other poets; namely, the sense of privation, the
loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country; he is even
without God in the world. He converses only with the spirits of the
departed; with the motionless and silent clouds. The cold moonlight
sheds its faint lustre on his head; the fox peeps out of the ruined
tower; the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale; and the
strings of his harp seem, as the hand of age, as the tale of other
times, passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the
winter's wind! The feeling of cheerless desolation, of the loss of the
pith and sap of existence, of the annihilation of the substance, and
the clinging to the shadow of all things, as in a mock-embrace, is
here perfect.
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