THE CELTIC MAGAZINE.
No. III.JANUARY 1876.
THE STATE OF THE OSSIANIC CONTROVERSY.
[Continued.]
Mr Arnold in that handsome, but slightly ambiguous admission of his,that the Celts in their intellectual capacity come very near the secretof nature and of natural magic, does not seem to imply more in realitythan that they have a subtler sense of certain natural affinities thantheir Anglo-Saxon brethren have; that they apprehend more surely when,where, and how the truest impress of physical nature occurs on thepercipient faculties of the soul, than men of a more phlegmaticconstitution do; and that they can draw from such intuitions of theirown a sort of inspiration, or second-sight of nature, comparable toprophecy, which gives their highest poetic utterance a raptenthusiasm—and the accuracy of this estimate need not be disputed, but,so far as Ossian is concerned, it must be considerably extended. To readOssian as we do, from the text of Macpherson, there was another sort ofinsight, purely scientific, into the mysteries of nature, inherited andexpressed by him; a certain acquaintance with her hidden powers, and acertain augury of her possible future development, if men could onlyattain to it, far beyond the mere rapt enthusiasm of a poet, or theso-called second-sight of a seer. Whether this peculiar faith of his wasderived by tradition, and if so, from whom; or whether it was the resultof practical experiment in his own generation, is foreign for the momentto our present inquiry. But that it was relied upon as an endowment ofthe most gifted heroes; that it was exercised by them in extremity, asif to subdue nature from whom they had borrowed it, and to wrest thevery power of destruction out of her hand; and that such practicalconquest was sometimes achieved by them, or is said to have beenachieved by them, is just as certain as that Macpherson's translation isbefore us now. What we refer to more especially for the present, is thesecret of extracting or discharging electricity from the atmosphere bymechanical means—by the thrust of a spear, or of a sword, into thebosom of the low-hanging cloud, or lurid vapour, and so dislodging theimaginary spirit of evil by which they were supposed to be tenanted.Only the very best, and bravest, and wisest could prevail in suchconflict with nature; but they did prevail, according to Ossian; and theweapons of their warfare, and the mode of their assault, were preciselysimilar to what an experimentalist in electricity might employ at thepresent day, or to what the Egyptians employed in the days of Moses. We[Pg 68]shall not now go further back in the prosecution of this inquiry, butwould seriously recommend the reader who has any difficulty on thesubject to compare, at his leisure, the work of Moses on the top ofMount Sinai and elsewhere, with an Egyptian "rod" in his hand, and theexploits of Fingal in conflict with the Spirit of Loda on the heights ofHoy, with a sword in his hand. There might have been a far-derived andlong traditional secret connection between the two, most edifying, or atleast most curious, to investigate; or they might both have resultedfrom that sort of intuition which only the most gifted of any nationenjoy independently, re-appearing again in Franklin, and nowfamiliarised to the world. Let those who doubt, or who differ on thispoint, satisfy themselves. What we are now concerned to maintain andprove is, that the fact is more than once described by Ossian, incircumstances, in situations, and with instrumentalities, which renderthe allegation of it at least indubitable. In the case above referredto, for