All Europe felt the power of that melancholy; but what I wish to point out is, that no nation of Europe so caught in its poetry the passionate penetrating accent of the Celtic genius, its strain of Titanism, as the English.  Goethe, like Napoleon, felt the spell of Ossian very powerfully, and he quotes a long passage from him in his Werther.[263] But what is there Celtic, turbulent, and Titanic about the German Werther, that amiable, cultivated and melancholy young man, having for his sorrow and suicide the perfectly definite motive that Lotte cannot be his?  Faust, again, has nothing unaccountable, defiant, and Titanic in him; his knowledge does not bring him the satisfaction he expected from it, and meanwhile he finds himself poor and growing old, and balked of the palpable enjoyment of life; and here is the motive for Faust’s discontent.  In the most energetic and impetuous of Goethe’s creations,—­ his Prometheus,[264]—­it is not Celtic self-will and passion, it is rather the Germanic sense of justice and reason, which revolts against the despotism of Zeus.  The German Sehnsucht itself is a wistful, soft, tearful longing, rather than a struggling, fierce, passionate one.  But the Celtic melancholy is struggling, fierce, passionate; to catch its note, listen to Llywarch Hen in old age, addressing his crutch:—­

“O my crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the water-flag yellow?  Have I not hated that which I love?

O my crutch! is it not winter-time now, when men talk together after that they have drunken?  Is not the side of my bed left desolate?

O my crutch! is it not spring, when the cuckoo passes through the air, when the foam sparkles on the sea?  The young maidens no longer love me.

O my crutch! is it not the first day of May?  The furrows, are they not shining; the young corn, is it not springing?  Ah! the sight of thy handle makes me wroth.

O my crutch! stand straight, thou wilt support me the better; it is very long since I was Llywarch.

Behold old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head to my teeth, to my eyes, which women loved.

The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me together,—­ coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow.

I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from me; the couch of honor shall be no more mine; I am miserable, I am bent on my crutch.

How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he was brought forth! sorrows without end, and no deliverance from his burden."[265]

There is the Titanism of the Celt, his passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact; and of whom does it remind us so much as of Byron?

  “The fire which on my bosom preys
  Is lone as some volcanic isle;
  No torch is kindled at its blaze;
  A funeral pile!"[266]

Or, again:—­

  “Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen,
  Count o’er thy days from anguish free,
  And know, whatever thou hast been,
  ’Tis something better not to be."[267]