‘Ghosts of the dead!'

Apparently written for St Irvyne, September-October 1810. St Irvyne was conceived and possibly begun by 1 April 1810 (L i 6), and was finished by 14 November (L i 20), but between these dates S. wrote and published two other volumes; so it is likely that most if not all of the novel, which opens in late autumn, was written at that season. In ch. i, Megalina de Metastasio, daughter 109of an Italian Count, is captured while crossing the Alps by bandits who ‘had inhumanly murdered him, and cast his lifeless body adown the yawning precipice’. Still uncertain of his fate, Megalina writes these lines on her cell-wall; then rubs them out, ‘ashamed of the exuberance of her imagination’. Despite its Swiss setting, the poem is very Ossianic: ‘… from the top of the windy mountain, speak ye ghosts of the dead! … No feeble voice is on the wind: no answer half-drowned in the storms of the hill’ etc. (‘Songs of Selma’, Fingal (2nd edn 1762) 212). S. was also influenced by Byron’s Hours of Idleness (1807), which includes an imitation of Ossian, ‘The Death of Calmar and Orla’ (see notes below).