Speaking to the brain of the country, one is sure of the power of a
resolute sign from it to dismiss the brainless. Banish him your revels
and your debatings, prohibit him your Christmas, lend no ear either to
his panics or his testiness, especially none to his rages; do not
report him at all, and he will soon subside into his domestic, varied by
pothouse, privacy. The brain should lead, if there be a brain. Once free
of him, you will know that for half a century you have appeared bottom
upward to mankind. And you have wondered at the absence of love for you
under so astounding a presentation. Even in a Bull, beneficent as he can
dream of being, when his notions are in a similar state of inversion,
should be sheepish in hope for love.

He too, whom you call the Welshman, and deride for his delight in
songful gatherings, harps to wild Wales, his Cambrian highlands, and
not to England. You have not yet, though he is orderly and serviceable,
allured his imagination to the idea of England. Despite the passion for
his mountains and the boon of your raising of the interdict (within a
hundred years) upon his pastors to harangue him in his native tongue, he
gladly ships himself across the waters traversed by his Prince Madoc of
tradition, and becomes contentedly a transatlantic citizen, a member
of strange sects--he so inveterate in faithfulness to the hoar and the
legendary!--Anything rather than Anglican. The Cymry bear you no hatred;
their affection likewise is undefined. But there is reason to think
that America has caught the imagination of the Cambrian Celt: names of
Welshmen are numerous in the small army of the States of the Union; and
where men take soldier-service they are usually fixed, they and their
children. Here is one, not very deeply injured within a century, of
ardent temperament, given to be songful and loving; he leaves you and
forgets you. Be certain that the material grounds of division are not
all. To pronounce it his childishness provokes the retort upon your
presented shape. He cannot admire it. Gaelic Scots wind the same note of
repulsion.

And your poets are in a like predicament. Your poets are the most
persuasive of springs to a lively general patriotism. They are in the
Celtic dilemma of standing at variance with Bull; they return him
his hearty antipathy, are unable to be epical or lyrical of him, are
condemned to expend their genius upon the abstract, the quaint,
the picturesque. Nature they r