Textual Feature | Appearance |
---|---|
Whitman's hand | blue double overline and underline |
Highlighting | yellow background with top and bottom border |
Paste-on | gray box with black borders |
Laid in | white box with black borders |
Erasure | white text with dark gray background |
Overwritten | brown with strikethrough |
For about two hours I saw the stars, and very cheery and companionable they looked; but then the mist fell, and I saw nothing more, except such apparitions as visited Ossian on the hill-side, when he went out by night and struck the bosky shield, and called to him the spirits of the heroes and the white-armed maids with their blue eyes of grief. To me, too, came those visionary shapes; floating slowly and gracefully, their white robes would unfurl from the great body of mist in which they had been engaged, and come upon me with a kiss pervasively cold as that of death. What they might have told me, who knows, if I had but resigned myself more passively to that cold, spirit-like breathing!
Ossian must not be despised—it means that kind of thought and character growing among a rude com-How misty, how windy, how full of diffused, only half-meaning words! —How curious a study!
☞—(Don't fall into the Ossianic, by any chance.)
? Can it be a descendant of the Biblical poetry? —Is it not Isaiah, Job, the Psalms, and so forth, transferred to the Scotch Highlands? (or to Ireland?)
? The tremendous figures and ideas of the Hebrew poems,— are they not original?—for they are certainly great—
(Yes they are original