,
of the joy and stress of living. But self-sacrifice scarcely enters
into their notion of the scheme of things, and they are by no means
men to go to death for an idea. We remember what figure Shakespeare
made of Sir John Oldcastle, and I wish we could forget what figure he
made of Joan of Arc. Within the bounds of his philosophy--the
philosophy, gloriously stated, of ordinary brave, full-blooded men--
he is a great encourager of virtue; and so such lines as--

"The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action . . ."

Are thoroughly Shakespearean, while such lines as--

"A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage . . ."

Are as little Shakespearean in thought as in phrasing. He can tell
us that:

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

He can muse on that sleep to come:--

"To die, to sleep;
To sleep; perchance to dream; aye, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause."

But that even in this life we may be more truly ourselves when
dreaming than when waking--that what we dream may perchance turn out
to be more real and more important than what we do--such a thought
overpasses his imaginative range; or, since to dogmatise on his
imaginative range is highly dangerous, let us be content with saying
that it lies outside his temperament, and that he would have hit on
such a thought only to dismiss it with contempt. So when we open a
book of poems and come upon a monarch crying out that:

"A wild and foolish labourer is a king,
To do and do and do and never dream,"

We know that we are hearkening to a note which is not Shakespearean
at all, not practical, not English. And we want a name for that
note.

I have followed the multitude to call it Celtic because in practice
when we come upon this note we are pretty safe to discover that the
poet who utters it has Celtic blood in him (Blake's poetry, for
instance, told me that he must be an Irishman before ever I reflected
that his name was Irish, or thought of looking up his descent).
Since, however the blood of most men in these islands is by this time
mixed with many strains: since also, though the note be not native
with him, nothing forbids even a pure-blooded Anglo-Saxon from
learning it and assi