Macpherson's diction must have also appealed to the growing
taste for poetry that was less ornate and studied. His practice
was to use a large number of concrete monosyllabic words of Anglo-Saxon
origin to describe objects and forces common to rural life.
A simple listing of the common nouns from the opening of "Fragment
I" will serve to illustrate this tendency: _love, son, hill,
deer, dogs, bow-string, wind, stream, rushes, mist, oak, friends_.
Such diction bears an obvious kinship to what was to become the
staple diction of the romantic lyric; for example, a similar listing
from "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" would be this: _slumber,
spirit, fears, thing, touch, years, motion, force, course, rocks,
stones, trees_.

The untamed power of Macpherson's wild natural settings is
also striking. Samuel H. Monk has made the point well:

"Ossian's strange exotic wildness and his obscure, terrible glimpses
of scenery were in essence something quite new.... Ossian's images were
far from "nature methodized." His imagination illumined fitfully a scene
of mountains and blasted heaths, as artificially wild as his heroines
were artificially sensitive; to modern readers they resemble too much
the stage-settings of melodrama. But in 1760, his descriptions carried
with them the thrill of the genuine and of naively archaic."

And Monk adds, "imperceptibly the Ossianic poems contributed
toward converting Britons, nay, Europeans, into enthusiastic admirers
of nature in her wilder moments."[14]

Ghosts are habitually present in the poems, and Macpherson
is able to present them convincingly because they are described