“The grave of March is this, and this the grave of Gwythyr;
  Here is the grave of Gwgawn Gleddyfreidd;
  But unknown is the grave of Arthur."[261]

That comes from the Welsh Memorials of the Graves of the Warriors, and if we compare it with the familiar memorial inscriptions of an English churchyard (for we English have so much Germanism in us that our productions offer abundant examples of German want of style as well as of its opposite):—­

  “Afflictions sore long time I bore,
  Physicians were in vain,
  Till God did please Death should me seize
  And ease me of my pain—­”

if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with the English, which in their Gemeinheit of style are truly Germanic, we shall get a clear sense of what that Celtic talent for style I have been speaking of is.

* * * * *

Its chord of penetrating passion and melancholy, again, its Titanism as we see it in Byron,—­what other European poetry possesses that like the English, and where do we get it from?  The Celts, with their vehement reaction against the despotism of fact, with their sensuous nature, their manifold striving, their adverse destiny, their immense calamities, the Celts are the prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion,—­of this Titanism in poetry.  A famous book, Macpherson’s Ossian,[262] carried in the last century this vein like a flood of lava through Europe.  I am not going to criticize Macpherson’s Ossian here.  Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious, in the book, as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which on the strength of Macpherson’s Ossian she may have stolen from that vetus et major Scotia, the true home of the Ossianic poetry, Ireland; I make no objection.  But there will still be left in the book a residue with the very soul of the Celtic genius in it, and which has the proud distinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic genius into contact with the genius of the nations of modern Europe, and enriched all our poetry by it.  Woody Morven, and echoing Sora, and Selma with its silent halls!—­we all owe them a debt of gratitude, and when we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse forget us!  Choose any one of the better passages in Macpherson’s Ossian and you can see even at this time of day what an apparition of newness and power such a strain must have been to the eighteenth century:—­

“I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate.  The fox looked out from the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round her head.  Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers.  They have but fallen before us, for one day we must fall.  Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days?  Thou lookest from thy towers today; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield.  Let the blast of the desert come! we shall be renowned in our day.”