ay be thus converted into
dreamful intuitions of hidden fact and poetic forecasting of future
discoveries. Mr Arnold, in his _Celtic Literature_, seems to glance at
such a capacity in Celtic man--"His sensibility gives him a peculiarly
near and intimate feeling of nature, and the life of nature; here, too,
he seems in a special way attracted by the secret before him, the secret
of natural beauty and natural magic, and to be close to it, to
half-divine it," p. 108. But Mr Arnold does not seem to include in this
capacity the intuitions of natural science, at least not for Ossian; yet
nothing can be more certain than that Ossian and his fellow-countrymen
enjoyed them.

That verification to such an extent, however, both of facts and
localities, and ideas--philosophic or imaginative, in the text of
Ossian, was possible, has scarcely hitherto been believed by any one; it
has certainly never been attempted. A sort of vagueness in many of his
descriptions ill-understood, and a similarity in poetic figures that
might be indiscriminately applied; and an occasional apparent conflict
or confusion of details seem to have deterred almost all readers from
the study we now recommend. But all these difficulties, of verification
and interpretation alike, are only on the surface; and not even there,
if it has been looked at attentively. Let any intelligent reader, with
the poems which refer to Scotland in his hand, survey the Clyde, the
Kelvin, and the Carron, and trace the still remaining footsteps of
nature and of civilization through distant centuries on their banks, and
he will see that Ossian has been there. Let him look steadily even at
the cloud-drifts from the Atlantic, as they troop or roll along in a
thousand fantastic forms, converging all to a certain inland range, and
he will understand that the author of these poems must have seen and
studied them so. Let him proceed then to Arran, and he will discover
there, if he looks and listens, not only scenes and traditions, and
monuments of sepulture, still associated with the names of Oscar and
Malvina, Fingal and Ossian--in literal confirmation of what has been
stated in the text concerning them; but the only reliable account, by
survey and tradition also, of the Fingalian expeditions from Morven to
Ireland. Let him then, by direct communication, which is occasionally
possible from Arran; or by any circuit he pleases, disembark in the Bay
of Larne "with its bosom of echoing woods,"