Page:Poems of Ossian.djvu/57

Rh argument of scholarship. It is one thing to criticise "Fingal" or "Temora" in the lamplight of the study; another matter entirely to be taken to the valley of the Six-mile-water in the neighbourhood of Lough Larne, and to be told that here the battles described in these poems were fought. This Dr. Waddell does, and then proceeds to trace the action of the Ossianic narratives, and to compare the allusions and descriptions these narratives contain with the actual features of the district. For nearly every epithet and statement he finds a corresponding fact in the landscape. A few of these only can be mentioned here. For "the lake of roes" on Cromla, near which fell Morna (Gaelic Muirne), the daughter of Cormac ("Fingal," B. i.), he points to the mountain tarn Lough Mourne. For the retreat of the Druid in the same neighbourhood, in which Sulmalla took refuge, and near which the spirit of Cathmor "sunk by the hollow stream that roared between the hills" ("Temora," B. viii.), he suggests the circle at Stony-glen close by the Sulla-(Sulmalla) tober or Sallow-well, whose waters disappear with such violence through an aperture in the ground as to justify Ossian's title of "Noisy" to the little vale at the present day. The mountain itself, the Larne and Belfast range, full of caves, with the great cromlech near Cairngrainey at one end,