of the gale?"

Byron attributed much importance to his early recollections of Highland
scenery, which he said had prepared him to love the Alps and "blue
Friuli's mountains," and "the Acroceraunian mountains of old name." But
the influence of Ossian upon Byron and his older contemporaries was
manifested in subtler ways than in formal imitations. It fell in with
that current of feeling which Carlyle called "Wertherism," and helped to
swell it. It chimed with the tone that sounds through the German _Sturm
und Drang_ period; that impatience of restraint, that longing to give
full swing to the claims of the elementary passions, and that desperation
when these are checked by the arrangements of modern society, which we
encounter in Rousseau and the young Goethe. Hence the romantic gloom,
the Byronic _Zerrissenheit_, to use Heine's word, which drove the poet
from the rubs of social life to waste places of nature and sometimes to
suicide. In such a mood the mind recurred to the language of Ossian, as
the fit expression of its own indefinite and stormy griefs.

"Homer," writes Werther, "has been superseded in my heart by the divine
Ossian. Through what a world does this angelic bard carry me! With him
I wander over barren wastes and frightful wilds; surrounded by whirlwinds
and hurricanes, trace by the feeble light of the moon the shades of our
noble ancestors; hear from the mountainous heights, intermingled with the
roaring of waves and cataracts, their plaintive tones stealing from
cavernous recesses; while the pensive monody of some love-stricken
maiden, who heaves her departing sighs over the moss-clad grave of the
warrior by whom she was adored, makes up the inarticulate concert. I
trace this bard, with his silver locks, as he wanders in the valley and
explores the footsteps of his fathers. Alas! no vestige remains but
their tombs. His thought then hangs on the silver moon, as her sinking
beams play upon the rippling main; and the remembrance of deeds past and
gone recurs to the hero's mind--deeds of times when he gloried in the
approach of danger, and emulation nerved his whole frame; when the pale
orb shone upon his bark, laden with the spoils of his enemy, and
illuminated his triumphant return. When I see depicted on his
countenance a bosom full of woe; when I behold his heroic greatness
sinking into the grave, and he exclaims, as he throws a glance at the
cold sod which is to lie upon him: 'Hither will the