by a poet who treats them as though they were part of his and his
audience's habitual experience. The supernatural world is so
familiar, in fact, that it can be used to describe the natural; thus
Minvane in "Fragment VII" is called as fair "as the spirits of the
hill when at silent noon they glide along the heath." As Patricia
M. Spacks has observed, the supernatural seems to be a "genuine
part of the poetic texture"; and she adds that

"within this poetic context, the supernatural seems convincing
because believed in: it is part of the fabric of life for the
characters of the poem. Ghosts in the Ossianic poems, almost uniquely
in the mid-eighteenth century, seem genuinely to belong; to this
particular poetic conception the supernatural does not seem
extraneous."[15]

The _Fragments_ was also a cause and a reflection of the rising
appeal of the hero of sensibility, whose principal characteristic
was that he could feel more intensely than the mass of humanity.
The most common emotion that these acutely empathetic heroes
felt was grief, the emotion that permeates the _Fragments_ and the
rest of Macpherson's work. It was the exquisite sensibility of
Macpherson's heroes and heroines that the young Goethe was
struck by; Werther, an Ossianic hero in his own way, comments,

"You should see what a silly figure I cut when she
is mentioned in society! And then if I am even asked
how I like her--Like! I hate that word like death. What
sort of person must that be who likes Lotte, in whom all
senses, all emotions are not completely filled up by her!
Like! Recently someone asked me how I like Ossian!"[16]