any as the typically Celtic qualities, which
prove the spuriousness of Ossian. That gaze fixed on formless and
distant shadows, that losing of oneself in contemplation, that vague
dreaminess, which Lamartine admired in Ossian, will be found nowhere in
the _Black Book of Carmarthen_, in the _Book of Taliesin_, in the _Red
Book of Hergest_, however much a doubtful text, uncertain readings, and
confusing commentators may leave us in uncertainty as to the real
meaning of many passages. Just as the true mystic is the man who sees
obscure things clearly, so the Welsh poets (whom I take for the moment
as representing the 'Celtic note,' the quality which we find in the work
of primitive races) saw everything in the universe, the wind itself,
under the images of mortality, hands and feet and the ways and motions
of men. They filled human life with the greatness of their imagination,
they ennobled it with the pride of their expectancy of noble things,
they were boundless in praising and in cursing; but poetical excitement,
in them, only taught them the amplitude and splendour of real things. A
chief is an eagle, a serpent, the bull of battle, an oak; he is the
strength of the ninth wave, an uplifted pillar of wrath, impetuous as
the fire through a chimney; the ruddy reapers of war are his desire.
The heart of Cyndyllan was like the ice of winter, like the fire of
spring; the horses of Geraint are ruddy ones, with the assault of
spotted eagles, of black eagles, of red eagles, of white eagles; an
onset in battle is like the roaring of the wind against the ashen
spears. These poets are the poets of 'tumults, shouting, swords, and men
in battle-array.' The sound of battle is heard in them; they are 'where
the ravens screamed over blood'; they are among 'crimsoned hair and
clamorous sorrow'; they praise 'war with the shining wing,' and they
know all the piteousness of the death of heroes, the sense of the
'delicate white body,' 'the lovely, slender, blood-stained body,' that
will be covered with earth, and sand, and stones, and nettles, and the
roots of the oak. They know too the piteousness of the hearth left
desolate, the hearth that will be covered with nettles, and slender
brambles, and thorns, and dock-leaves, and scratched up by fowls, and
turned up by swine. And they praise the gentleness of strength and
courage: 'he was gentle, with a hand eager for battle.' Women are known
chiefly as the widows and the 'sleepless' mothers of he