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CELTIC POETRY. |
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Shall weep to do the burial rites
Of lost ones loved ; and fondly found
In shadow of the gathering nights The monumental mound.
Farewell, the strength of men is worn ;
The night approaches dark and chill; Sleep till, perchance, an endless morn
Descend the glittering hill " —
Of Oscar and Aideen bereft
So Ossian sang. The Fenians sped
Three mighty shouts to heaven ; and left Ben-Edar to the dead.
The spirit of Ossian, the woe and desolation of a mortal world, and the resigned but not bitter sense of the vanity of all things, lives in this solemn elegy.
The charming lyrics of the later Irish Celtic poetry, which succeeded that of the bards, and were the voices of the peasant people themselves and of the professional descendants of the bards, the itinerant poets and musicians, who wandered from house to house with their harps, singing the praises of their entertainers, and were not extinct until the end of the last century, have found an adequate interpreter in Sir Samuel Ferguson. As in his reproductions of the bardic poetry, he has been able to seize the very spirit of these songs, their intoxication of love, their breath of hopeless |
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