In his poetry, as in
Homer's, only the simplest and most enduring features of humanity
are seen, such essential parts of a man as Stonehenge exhibits of
a temple; we see the circles of stone, and the upright shaft
alone. The phenomena of life acquire almost an unreal and
gigantic size seen through his mists. Like all older and grander
poetry, it is distinguished by the few elements in the lives of
its heroes. They stand on the heath, between the stars and the
earth, shrunk to the bones and sinews. The earth is a boundless
plain for their deeds. They lead such a simple, dry, and
everlasting life, as hardly needs depart with the flesh, but is
transmitted entire from age to age. There are but few objects to
distract their sight, and their life is as unencumbered as the
course of the stars they gaze at.
"The wrathful kings, on cairns apart,
Look forward from behind their shields,
And mark the wandering stars,
That brilliant westward move."
It does not cost much for these heroes to live; they do not want
much furniture. They are such forms of men only as can be seen
afar through the mist, and have no costume nor dialect, but for
language there is the tongue itself, and for costume there are
always the skins of beasts and the bark of trees to be had. They
live out their years by the vigor of their constitutions. They
survive storms and the spears of their foes, and perform a few
heroic deeds, and then
"Mounds will answer questions of them,
For many future years."
Blind and infirm, they spend the remnant of their days listening
to the lays of the bards, and feeling the weapons which laid
their enemies low, and when at length they die, by a convulsion
of nature, the bard allows us a short and misty glance into
futurity, yet as clear, perchance, as their lives had been. When
Mac-Roine was slain,
"His soul departed to his warlike sires,
To follow misty forms of boars,
In tempestuous islands bleak."
The hero's cairn is erected, and the bard sings a brief
significant strain, which will suffice for epitaph and biography.
"The weak will find his bow in the dwelling,
The feeble will attempt to bend it."
Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history
appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of
luxury. But the civilized man misses no real refinement in the
poetry of the rudest era. It reminds him that civilization does
but dress men. It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles
of the feet. It makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not
touch the skin. Inside the civilized man stand the savage still
in the place of honor. We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired
Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans.
