of Walt
Whitman in prose poetry and for the rapid growth of poetic prose through
De Quincey, Bulwer Lytton, and Ruskin. During last century it stirred
Blake to misty prophecies, led writers of romance back into the less
known periods of the past, and gave the new audience a delight in
mysterious and almost formless legend and tale and idea."

The extraordinary vogue of Macpherson's Ossianic poems was due to
literary merit of a high order, and also to the parched and dry state
into which the poetry of Europe had sunk in the middle of the eighteenth
century. Boileau and his rules had crushed all sap and life out of
European verse, and the poet had become either a teacher of rimed ethics
or a framer of dexterous satire. How refreshing Ossian must have been to
the men of such a time:

"The hills were round them, and the breeze
Went o'er the sun-lit fields again;
Their foreheads felt the wind and rain."

Let the modern reader go through the _Rape of the Lock_, and then take
up the song of the hunter Shilric from Macpherson's "Carric-thura."

Shilric, not knowing that his love Vinvela is dead, thus communes with
himself:

"I sit by the mossy mountain; on the top of the hill of winds.
One tree is rustling above me. Dark waves roll over the heath.
The lake is troubled below. The deer descend from the hill. No
hunter at a distance is seen. It is mid-day; but all is silent.
Sad are my thoughts alone. Didst thou but appear, O my love! a
wanderer on the heath! thy hair floating on the wind behind
thee; thy bosom heaving on the sight; thine eyes full of tears
for thy friends, whom the mist of the hill had concealed! Thee I
would comfort, my love, and bring thee to thy father's house!"

To him mourning thus, the spirit of his dead love appears:

"But is it she that there appears, like a beam of light on the
heath? bright as the moon in autumn, as the sun in a
summer-storm, comest thou, O maid, over rocks, over mountains to
me? She speaks: but how weak her voice! like the breeze in the
reeds of the lake.

"'Alone I am, O Shilric! alone in the winter-house. With grief
for thee I fell. Shilric, I am pale in the tomb.'

"She fleets, she sails away; as mist before the wind! and wilt
thou not stay, Vinvela? Stay and behold my tears! fair thou
appearest, Vinvela! fair thou wast, when alive!

"By the mossy mountain I will sit; on the top