battle between light and darkness, Arthur and Modred, should be fought again, and this time won, and the Mysteries re-established.—­If I have succeeded in conveying to you anything of the atmosphere of this poem, I have given you more or less that of most of the poetry attributed to this period; there is a large mass of it:  some of the poems, like the long Gododin of Aneurin, merely telling of battles; others, like the splendid elegies of Llywarch Hen, being laments,—­but with a marvelous haughty uplift to them; and others again, those attributed to Taliesin, strewn here and there with passages that . . . move me strangely . . . and remind me (to borrow a leaf from the Imagists) of a shower of diamonds struck from some great rock of it; and of a sunset over purple mountains; and of the Mysteries of Antiquity; and of the Divine Human Soul.  Much of this poetry is unintelligible; much of it undoubtedly of far later origin; and the names of Taliesin and Myrddin, all through the centuries spells for Celts to conjure with, are now the laughing-stock of a brand-new scholarship that has tidied them up into limbo in the usual way.  It is what happens when you treat poetry with the brain-mind, instead of with the creative imagination God gave you to treat it with:  when you dissect it, instead of feeding your soul with it.  But this much is true, I think:  out of this poetry, the occasional intelligible flashes of it, rings out a much greater note than any I know of in our Welsh literature since:  a sense of much profounder, much less provincial things:  the Grand Manner,—­of which we have had echoes since, in the long centuries of our provincialism; but only I think echoes; —­but you shall find something more than echoes of it, say in Llywarch Hen, in a sense of heroic uplift, of the titanic unconquerableness that is in the Soul;—­and in Taliesin, in a sense of the wizardly all-pervadingness of that Soul in space and time: 

     “I know the imagination of the oak-trees.”

     “Not of father and mother,
     When I became,
     My creator created me;
     But of nine-formed faculties,
     Of the Fruit of fruits,
     Of the fruit of primordial God;
     Of primroses and mountain flowers,
     Of the blooms of trees and shrubs,
     Of Earth, of an earthly course,
     When I became,—­
     Of the blooms of the nettle,
     Of the foam of the Ninth Wave. 
     I was enchanted by Math
     Before I became immortal. 
     I was enchanted by Gwydion,
     The purifier of Brython,
     Of Eurwys, of Euron,
     Of Euron, of Modron,—­
     Of Five Battalions of Initiates,
     High Teachers, the children of Math.”