although in parts his diction was turgid and bombastic.[27] A poem in
the "Hours of Idleness," upon the Scotch mountain "Lachin Y Gair," has
two Ossianic lines in quotation points--

"Shades of the dead! have I not heard your voices
Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?"

Byron attributed much importance to his early recollections of Highland
scenery, which he said had prepared him to love the Alps and "blue
Friuli's mountains," and "the Acroceraunian mountains of old name." But
the influence of Ossian upon Byron and his older contemporaries was
manifested in subtler ways than in formal imitations. It fell in with
that current of feeling which Carlyle called "Wertherism," and helped to
swell it. It chimed with the tone that sounds through the German _Sturm
und Drang_ period; that impatience of restraint, that longing to give
full swing to the claims of the elementary passions, and that desperation
when these are checked by the arrangements of modern society, which we
encounter in Rousseau and the young Goethe. Hence the romantic gloom,
the Byronic _Zerrissenheit_, to use Heine's word, which drove the poet
from the rubs of social life to waste places of nature and sometimes to
suicide. In such a mood the mind recurred to the language of Ossian, as
the fit expression of its own indefinite and stormy griefs.

"Homer," writes Werther, "has been superseded in my heart by the divine
Ossian. Through what a world does this angelic bard carry me! With him
I wander over barren wastes and frightful wilds; surrounded by whirlwinds
and hurricanes, trace by the feeble light of the moon the shades of our
noble ancestors; hear from the mountainous heights, intermingled with the
roaring of waves and cataracts, their plaintive tones stealing from
cavernous recesses; while the pensive monody of some love-stricken