One has only to let one’s memory begin to fetch passages from Byron striking the same note as that passage from Llywarch Hen, and she will not soon stop.  And all Byron’s heroes, not so much in collision with outward things, as breaking on some rock of revolt and misery in the depths of their own nature; Manfred, self-consumed, fighting blindly and passionately with I know not what, having nothing of the consistent development and intelligible motive of Faust,—­Manfred, Lara, Cain,[268] what are they but Titanic?  Where in European poetry are we to find this Celtic passion of revolt so warm-breathing, puissant, and sincere; except perhaps in the creation of a yet greater poet than Byron, but an English poet, too, like Byron,—­in the Satan of Milton?

“...  What though the field be lost?  All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield, And what is else not to be overcome."[269]

There, surely, speaks a genius to whose composition the Celtic fibre was not wholly a stranger!

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The Celt’s quick feeling for what is noble and distinguished gave his poetry style; his indomitable personality gave it pride and passion; his sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature.  The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in romance.  They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are Nature’s own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and Latin poetry.  Now of this delicate magic, Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress, that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts.[270] Magic is just the word for it,—­the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature,—­that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism,—­that the Germans had; but the intimate life of Nature, her weird power and her fairy charm.  As the Saxon names of places, with the pleasant wholesome smack of the soil in them,—­ Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford,—­are to the Celtic names of places, with their penetrating, lofty beauty,—­Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon,—­ so is the homely realism of German and Norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature.  Gwydion wants a wife for his pupil:  “Well,” says Math, “we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers.  So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw.  And they baptized her, and gave her the name of Flower-Aspect."[271] Celtic romance is full of exquisite touches like that, showing the delicacy of the Celt’s feeling in