’Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore,
And coming events cast their shadows before.

These lines are from Thomas Campbell’s poem “Lochiel’s Warning,” a Romantic-era narrative set in the Scottish Highlands on the eve of the Jacobite rising of 1745. In the poem, the seer (a prophetic figure) warns Donald Cameron of Lochiel against joining Prince Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”), foretelling disaster for the cause and for Lochiel’s clan. Campbell, writing in the early 19th century, uses the Highland setting and the voice of prophecy to dramatize how late-in-life reflection and ominous political “signs” can make the future feel already visible in the present.

The speaker claims that life’s “sunset”—old age, or the late stage of experience—brings a kind of “mystical lore”: heightened intuition, pattern-recognition, and a sense of foreknowledge. The second line turns that intuition into a vivid metaphor: future events “cast their shadows before,” as if the coming catastrophe is already darkening the present. In the poem’s context, the idea is not abstract wisdom but a warning: political ambition and romantic heroism are haunted by consequences that can be read in advance by those willing to see. The couplet has endured as a general proverb about foresight and ominous premonitions.

“Coming events cast their shadows before.”