ABSTRACT
The pen-and-ink drawing is not actually of Fingal's Cave at all, but a tranquil view of the Firth of Lorn near Oban on the western coast of Scotland, with a glimpse of the ruins of Dunollie Castle through the branches of an oak tree. The images that Ossian "dreams" are also those that would have inhabited the imaginations of susceptible Romantic tourists gazing on the wild and desolate landscape of the Hebrides or the dim, ominously "resounding" interior of Fingal's Cave. Ossian was a symbol not of any factual, historical past, but the past of the Romantic imagination, and of the generative, creative power of that imagination itself. During the epoch of Ossian's greatest influence, in the decades around 1800, there developed a popular genre of "magic lantern" projection devoted to the visual "realization" of ghosts and spirits, and known—in the colorfully pretentious style of early commerical jargonizingas the phantasmagoria.
