But when we turn to the Celtic remains, the picture we find is altogether different.  Their literature tells of a people, in the Biblical phrase, “with a proud look and a high stomach.”  It is full of flashing colors, gaiety, titanic pride.  There was no grayness, no mournful twilight hue on the horizon of their mind; their ‘Other-World’ was only more dawn-lit, more noon-illumined, than this one; Ireland of the living was sun-bright and sparkling and glorious; but the ‘Great Plain’ of the dead was far more sun-bright and sparkling than Ireland.  It is the literature of a people accustomed to victory and predominance.  When they began to meet defeat they by no means acquiesced in it.  They regarded adverse fate, not with reverence, but with contempt.  They saw in sorrow no friend and instructress of the human soul; were at pains to learn no lesson from her; instead, they pitted what was their pride, but what they would have called the glory of their own souls, against her; they made no terms, asked no truce; but went on believing the human—­or perhaps I should say the Celtic—­soul more glorious than fate, stronger to endure and defy than she to humiliate and torment.  In many sense it was a fatal attitude, and they reaped the misery of it; but they gained some wealth for the human spirit from it too.  The aged Oisin has returned from Fairyland to find the old glorious order in Ireland fallen and passed during the three centuries of his absence.  High Paganism has gone, and a religion meek, inglorious, and Unceltic has taken its mission thereto:  tells him the gods are conquered and dead, and that the omnipotent God of the Christians reigns alone now.—­“I would thy God were set on yonder hill to fight with my son Oscar!” replies Oisin.  Patrick paints for him the hell to which he is destined unless he accepts Christianity; and Oisin answers: 

“Put the staff in my hands! for I go to the Fenians, thou
cleric, to chant
The warsongs that roused them of old; they will rise,
making clouds with their breath. 
Innumerable, singing, exultant; and hell underneath them
shall pant,
And demons be broken in pieces, and trampled beneath them
in death.”

“No,” says Patrick; “none war on the masters of hell, who could break up the world in their rage”; and bids him weep and kneel in prayer for his lost soul.  But that will not do for the old Celtic warrior bard; no tame heaven for him.  He will go to hell; he will not surrender the pride and glory of his soul to the mere meanness of fate.  He will

“Go to Caolte and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair
And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or
at feast.”

So with Llywarch Hen, Prince of Cumberland, in his old age and desolation.  His kingdom has been conquered; he is in exile in Wales; his four and twenty sons, “wearers of golden torques, proud rulers of princes,” have been slain; he is considerably over a hundred years old, and homeless, and sick; but no whit of his pride is gone.  He has learnt no lesson from life excepts this One:  that fate and Karma and sorrow are not so proud, not so skillful to persecute, as the human soul is capable of bitter resentful endurance.  He is titanically angry with destiny; but never meek or acquiescent.