Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/36

 November 9 and 20; for he had engaged to read a lecture on Poetry on the 29th, before the Concord Lyceum, and it was for that he made the selections from Ossian which appear briefly indicated in the journal. In publishing this lecture, as he did in The Dial for January 1844, he gave the extracts in full. They were taken from a work then recent and now almost forgotten, The Genuine Remains of Ossian, Literally Translated, with a Preliminary Dissertation, by Patrick MacGregor. This was published in London in 1841, under the patronage of the Highland Society of London; and it revived the interest in the Gaelic bards, which the inventions and mystifications of MacPherson in the eighteenth century had finally discouraged. The controversy over this Celtic poesy is not yet ended, and Thoreau's treating Ossian seriously has caused his critics some amusement.

It should be remembered that we are here dealing with an actual copy, in Thoreau's handwriting, of a journal no longer extant; and that the entries were made on the general subject of Poetry, which he was then studying for his lecture. Many of these [xxviii]