James Macpherson Zitate
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James Macpherson war ein schottischer Schriftsteller und Politiker.

✵ 27. Oktober 1736 – 17. Februar 1796
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James Macpherson: Zitate auf Englisch

“Hail, Carril of other times! Thy voice is like the harp in the halls of Tura.”

Book V
The Poems of Ossian, Fingal, an ancient Epic Poem

“Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.”

Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) p. 1207.
Criticism

“The gloom of the battle roared.”

Book III
The Poems of Ossian, Fingal, an ancient Epic Poem

“All hail, Macpherson! hail to thee, Sire of Ossian! The Phantom was begotten by the suing embrace of all impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition—it travelled southward, where it was greeted with acclamation, and the thin Consistence took its course through Europe, upon the breath of popular applause. […] Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious. In Nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness. In Macpherson's work, it is exactly the reverse; every thing (that is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened,—yet nothing distinct. It will always be so when words are substituted for things. […] Yet, much as those pretended treasures of antiquity have been admired, they have been wholly uninfluential upon the literature of the Country. No succeeding writer appears to have taught from them a ray of inspiration; no author, in the least distinguished, has ventured formally to imitate them—except the boy, Chatterton, on their first appearance. […] This incapacity to amalgamate with the literature of the Island, is, in my estimation, a decisive proof that the book is essentially unnatural; nor should I require any other to demonstrate it to be a forgery, audacious as worthless.”

William Wordsworth, "Essay Supplementary to the Preface" http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?textsid=35963 in Poems by William Wordsworth, Vol. I (1815), pp. 363–365.
Criticism

“I look down from my height on nations
And they become ashes before me.”

"Carric", quoted in Thoreau, "Life Without Principle"
The Poems of Ossian

“We may boldly assign him [Ossian] a place among those, whose works are to last for ages.”

Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), p. 75.
Criticism

“Whither hast thou fled, O wind?”

said the king of Morven. "Dost thou rustle in the chambers of the south? pursuest thou the shower in other lands? Why dost thou not come to my sails? to the blue face of my seas?"
"Lathmon"
The Poems of Ossian

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