You hear the high pride and pathos in that.  To be a poet, he says:  to have heard the gold-snooded Muses sing:  is the highest happiness a mortal can know; he is mindful of the soul, the Poet-creator in every man, and pays it magnificent tribute; he acknowledges what glory, what bliss, have been his own; but not the poet, he says, not even he, may enjoy the commonplace happiness of feeling secure against dark fate.  It is the same feeling that I spoke of last week as so characteristic of the early Teutonic literature; but there it appears without the swift sense of tragedy, without the sudden pang, the grand manner.  The pride is lacking quite:  the intuition for a divinity within man.  But Homer sets the glory of soul-hood and pet-hood against the sorrow of fate:  even though he finds the sorrow weighs it down.  Caedmon or Cynewulf might have said:  “It is given to none of us to be secure against fate; but we have many recompenses.”  How different the note of Milton: 

     “Those other two, equal with me in fate,
     So were I equal with them in renown—­”

or: 

     “Unchanged, though fallen on evil days;
     On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
     In darkness, and by dangers compassed round.”

And Llywarch, or Oisin, would never have anticipated the blows of fate; when the blows fell, they would simply have been astonished at fate’s presumption.

We might quote many instances of this proud pessimism in Homer: 

     Kai se, geron, to prin men, akouomen, olbion einai—­

     “Thou to, we hear, old man, e’en thou was at once time happy;”

      Hos gar epeklosanto theoi deiloisi brotoisin
     Zoein achnumenous.  Autoi de l’akedees eisin—­

     “The Gods have allotted to us to live thus mortal and mournful,
     Mournful; but they themselves live ever untouched by mourning.”

Proud—­no; it is not quite proud; not in an active sense; there is a resignation in it; and yet it is a kind of haughty resignation.  As if he said:  We are miserable; there is nothing else to be but miserable; let us be silent, and make no fuss about.—­It is the restraint—­a very Greek quality—­the depth hinted at, but never wailed over or paraded at all—­that make in these cases his grand manner.  His attitude is, I think, nearer the Teutonic than the Celtic:—­his countrymen, like the Teutons, were accustomed to the pralaya, the long racial night.  But he and the Celts achieved the grand manner, which the Teutons did not.  His eyes, like Llywarch’s or Oisin’s, were fixed on a past glory beyond the nightfall.