these matters, and how deeply Nature lets him come into her secrets.  The quick dropping of blood is called “faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest.”  And thus is Olwen described:  “More yellow was her hair than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemony amidst the spray of the meadow fountains."[272] For loveliness it would be hard to beat that; and for magical clearness and nearness take the following:—­

“And in the evening Peredur entered a valley, and at the head of the valley he came to a hermit’s cell, and the hermit welcomed him gladly, and there he spent the night.  And in the morning he arose, and when he went forth, behold, a shower of snow had fallen the night before, and a hawk had killed a wild-fowl in front of the cell.  And the noise of the horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted upon the bird.  And Peredur stood and compared the blackness of the raven, and the whiteness of the snow, and the redness of the blood, to the hair of the lady whom best he loved, which was blacker than the raven, and to her skin, which was whiter than the snow, and to her two cheeks which were redder than the blood upon the snow appeared to be."[273]

And this, which is perhaps less striking, is not less beautiful:—­

“And early in the day Geraint and Enid left the wood, and they came to an open country, with meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the meadows.  And there was a river before them, and the horses bent down and drank the water.  And they went up out of the river by a steep bank, and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his neck; and he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the mouth of the pitcher."[274]

And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek in its clear beauty, is suddenly magicalized by the romance touch,—­

“And they saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one-half of which was in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in full leaf.”

Magic is the word to insist upon,—­a magically vivid and near interpretation of nature; since it is this which constitutes the special charm and power of the effect I am calling attention to, and it is for this that the Celt’s sensibility gives him a peculiar aptitude.  But the matter needs rather fine handling, and it is easy to make mistakes here in our criticism.  In the first place, Europe tends constantly to become more and more one community, and we tend to become Europeans instead of merely Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians; so whatever aptitude or felicity one people imparts into spiritual work, gets imitated by the others, and thus tends to become the common property of all.  Therefore anything so beautiful and attractive as the natural magic I am speaking of, is sure, nowadays, if it appears