For safe retreat, a high and strong stockade
Around their dwellings. And when winter fell
And o'er Strathpeffer laid its barren spell--
When days were bleak with storm, and nights were drear
And dark and lonesome, well they loved to hear
The songs of Ossian, peerless and sublime--
Their blind, grey bard, grown old before his time,
Lamenting for his son--the young, the brave
Oscar, who fell beside the western wave
In Gavra's bloody and unequal fight.

Round Ossian would they gather in the night,
Beseeching him for song ... And when he took
His clarsach, from the magic strings he shook
A maze of trembling music, falling sweet
As mossy waters in the summer heat;
And soft as fainting moor-winds when they leave
The fume of myrtle, on a dewy eve,
Bound flush'd and teeming tarns that all night hear
Low elfin pipings in the woodlands near.

'Twas thus he sang of love, and in a dream
The fair maids sighed to hear. But when his theme
Was the long chase that Finn and all his men
Followed with lightsome heart from glen to glen--
His song was free as morn, and clear and loud
As skylarks carolling below a cloud
In sweet June weather ... And they heard the fall
Of mountain streams, the huntsman's windy call
Across the heaving hills, the baying hound