Yet no, it is not for what he thus gives them that such souls love him most! it is rather because of the emotion which lends to his voice so touching an accent, it is because he too yearns as they do for something unattained by him.  What an affinity for Christianity had this persecutor of the Christians!  The effusion of Christianity, its relieving tears, its happy self-sacrifice, were the very element, one feels, for which his soul longed; they were near him, they brushed him, he touched them, he passed them by.  One feels, too, that the Marcus Aurelius one reads must still have remained, even had Christianity been fully known to him, in a great measure himself; he would have been no Justin;—­but how would Christianity have affected him? in what measure would it have changed him?  Granted that he might have found, like the Alogi[249] of modern times, in the most beautiful of the Gospels, the Gospel which has leavened Christendom most powerfully, the Gospel of St. John, too much Greek metaphysics, too much gnosis;[250] granted that this Gospel might have looked too like what he knew already to be a total surprise to him:  what, then, would he have said to the Sermon on the Mount, to the twenty-sixth chapter of St. Matthew?  What would have become of his notions of the exitiabilis superstitio, of the “obstinacy of the Christians”?  Vain question! yet the greatest charm of Marcus Aurelius is that he makes us ask it.  We see him wise, just, self-governed, tender, thankful, blameless; yet, with all this, agitated, stretching out his arms for something beyond,—­tendentemque manus ripae ulterioris amore.[251]

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE CELTS TO ENGLISH LITERATURE[252]

If I were asked where English poetry got these three things, its turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic, for catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and vivid way,—­I should answer, with some doubt, that it got much of its turn for style from a Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got much of its melancholy from a Celtic source; with no doubt at all, that from a Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic.

Any German with penetration and tact in matters of literary criticism will own that the principal deficiency of German poetry is in style; that for style, in the highest sense, it shows but little feeling.  Take the eminent masters of style, the poets who best give the idea of what the peculiar power which lies in style is—­Pindar, Virgil, Dante, Milton.  An example of the peculiar effect which these poets produce, you can hardly give from German poetry.  Examples enough you can give from German poetry of the effect produced by genius, thought, and feeling expressing themselves in clear language, simple language, passionate language, eloquent language, with harmony and melody:  but not of the peculiar effect exercised by eminent power of style.  Every reader of Dante can at once call to mind what the peculiar effect I mean is; I spoke of it in my lectures on translating Homer, and there I took an example of it from Dante, who perhaps manifests it more eminently than any other poet.