giving no explanation.

To MacPherson, however, I will do this justice, that he had the
merit to perceive, even in the debased and floating ballads of the
highlands, traces of some past greatness and sublimity of thought,
and to understand, he, for the first time, how much more they meant
than what met the ear. But he saw, too, that the historical origin
of the ballads, and the position in time and place of the heroes
whom they praised, had been lost in that colony removed since the
time of St. Columba from its old connection with the mother
country. Thus released from the curb of history, he gave free rein
to the imagination, and in the conventional literary language of
sublimity, gave full expression to the feelings that arose within
him, as to him, pondering over those ballads, their gigantesque
element developed into a greatness and solemnity, and their
vagueness and indeterminateness into that misty immensity and weird
obscurity which, as constituent factors in a poem, not as
back-ground, form one of the elements of the false sublime. Either
not seeing the literary necessity of definiteness, or having no
such abundant and ordered literature as we possess, upon which to
draw for details, and being too conscientious to invent facts,
however he might invent language, he published his epics of Ossian--
false indeed to the original, but true to himself, and to the
feelings excited by meditation upon them. This done, he had not
sufficient courage to publish also the rude, homely, and often
vulgar ballads--a step which, in that hard critical age, would have
been to expose himself and his country to swift contempt. The
thought of the great lexicographer riding rough-shod over the poor
mountain songs which he loved, and the fame which he had already