Let My Feast Be Spread In The Hall,
Let Every Sweet-Voiced Minstrel Sing;
Great Is He Who Is Within My Walls,
Sons Of Wave-Echoing Croma.'"
Even Ossian himself, the hero-bard, pays tribute to the superior
strength of his father Fingal.
"How beauteous, mighty man, was thy mind,
Why succeeded Ossian without its strength?"
- - - - - - - -
While we sailed fleetly before the wind, with the river gurgling
under our stern, the thoughts of autumn coursed as steadily
through our minds, and we observed less what was passing on the
shore, than the dateless associations and impressions which the
season awakened, anticipating in some measure the progress of the
year.
I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before,
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore.
Sitting with our faces now up stream, we studied the landscape by
degrees, as one unrolls a map, rock, tree, house, hill, and
meadow, assuming new and varying positions as wind and water
shifted the scene, and there was variety enough for our
entertainment in the metamorphoses of the simplest objects.
Viewed from this side the scenery appeared new to us.
The most familiar sheet of water viewed from a new hill-top,
yields a novel and unexpected pleasure. When we have travelled a
few miles, we do not recognize the profiles even of the hills
which overlook our native village, and perhaps no man is quite
familiar with the horizon as seen from the hill nearest to his
house, and can recall its outline distinctly when in the valley.
We do not commonly know, beyond a short distance, which way the
hills range which take in our houses and farms in their sweep.
As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been
thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the
wound heals and the scar disappears, do we begin to discover
where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere.
It is an important epoch when a man who has always lived on the
east side of a mountain, and seen it in the west, travels round
and sees it in the east. Yet the universe is a sphere whose
centre is wherever there is intelligence. The sun is not so
central as a man. Upon an isolated hill-top, in an open country,
we seem to ourselves to be standing on the boss of an immense
shield, the immediate landscape being apparently depressed below
the more remote, and rising gradually to the horizon, which is
the rim of the shield, villas, steeples, forests, mountains, one
above another, till they are swallowed up in the heavens. The
most distant mountains in the horizon appear to rise directly
from the shore of that lake in the woods by which we chance to be
standing, while from the mountain-top, not only this, but a
thousand nearer and larger lakes, are equally unobserved.
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