Note 15 — Zhukovsky.

The melancholy character of the whole of this passage, may serve to recall Ossian’s sublimely beautiful and tender song of sorrow. I shall be excused for introducing it.—“Desolate is the dwelling of Moina: silence is in the house of her fathers. Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers. They have but fallen before us; for one day we must fall. Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days? thou lookest from thy towers to-day; yet a few years and the blast of the desert comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield. And let the blast of the desert come! we shall be renowned in our day. The mark of my arm shall be in battle; my name in the song of bards. Raise the song, send round the shell; let joy be heard in my hall. When thou, sun of heaven! shalt fail—if thou shalt fail, thou mighty light! if thy brightness is for a season, like Fingal,—our fame shall survive thy beams.”—Carthon.

In the same touching spirit is the noble address to the sun.—“O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers! whence are thy beams, O sun!—thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty, the stars hide themselves in the sky: the moon cold and pale sinks in the western wave. But thou thyself movest alone: who can be a companion of thy course? The oaks of the mountains fall; the mountains themselves decay with years; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon herself is lost in heaven; but thou art for ever the same, rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. When the world is dark with tempests, when thunder rolls and lightning flies, thou lookest in thy beauty from the clouds, and laughest at the storm. But to Ossian, thou lookest in vain; for he beholds thy beams no more, whether thy yellow hair flows on the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west. But thou art perhaps, like me, for a season, and thy years will have an end. Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds, careless of the voice of the morning. Exult then, O sun, in the strength of thy youth! age is dark and unlovely; it is like the glimmering light of the moon, when it shines through broken clouds and the mist is on the hills: the blast of the north is on the plain—the traveller shrinks in the midst of his journey.”—Ibid.