[Sidenote:  The Welsh Poetry]

The gay extravagance of these “Mabinogion” flings defiance to all fact, tradition, probability, and revels in the impossible and unreal.  When Arthur sails into the unknown world it is in a ship of glass.  The “descent into hell,” as a Celtic poet paints it, shakes off the mediaeval horror with the mediaeval reverence, and the knight who achieves the quest spends his years of infernal durance in hunting and minstrelsy, and in converse with fair women.  The world of the Mabinogion is a world of pure phantasy, a new earth of marvels and enchantments, of dark forests whose silence is broken by the hermit’s bell and sunny glades where the light plays on the hero’s armour.  Each figure as it moves across the poet’s canvas is bright with glancing colour.  “The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk, and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold in which were precious emeralds and rubies.  Her head was of brighter gold than the flower of the broom, her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain.  The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the falcon, was not brighter than hers.  Her bosom was more snowy than the breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the reddest roses.”  Everywhere there is an Oriental profusion of gorgeous imagery, but the gorgeousness is seldom oppressive.  The sensibility of the Celtic temper, so quick to perceive beauty, so eager in its thirst for life, its emotions, its adventures, its sorrows, its joys, is tempered by a passionate melancholy that expresses its revolt against the impossible, by an instinct of what is noble, by a sentiment that discovers the weird charm of nature.  The wildest extravagance of the tale-teller is relieved by some graceful play of pure fancy, some tender note of feeling, some magical touch of beauty.  As Kulwch’s greyhounds bound from side to side of their master’s steed, they “sport round him like two sea-swallows.”  His spear is “swifter than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth when the dew of June is at the heaviest.”  A subtle, observant love of nature and natural beauty takes fresh colour from the passionate human sentiment with which it is imbued.  “I love the birds” sings Gwalchmai “and their sweet voices in the lulling songs of the wood”; he watches at night beside the fords “among the untrodden grass” to hear the nightingale and watch the play of the sea-mew.  Even patriotism takes the same picturesque form.  The Welsh poet hates the flat and sluggish land of the Saxon; as he dwells on his own he tells of “its sea-coast and its mountains, its towns on the forest border, its fair landscape, its dales, its waters, and its valleys, its white sea-mews, its beauteous women.”  Here as everywhere the sentiment of nature passes swiftly and subtly into the sentiment of a human tenderness:  “I love its fields