gift of ours, do not and cannot get in this way, though they may get it in others.  It is worth noticing that the masterpieces of the spiritual work of Indo-Europeans, taking the pure religious sentiment, and not the imaginative reason, for their basis, are works like the Imitation, the Dies Irae, the Stabat Mater—­works clothing themselves in the middle-age Latin, the genuine native voice of no Indo-European nation.  The perfection of their kind, but that kind not perfectly legitimate, they take a language not perfectly legitimate; as if to show, that when mankind’s Semitic age is once passed, the age which produced the great incomparable monuments of the pure religious sentiment, the books of Job and Isaiah, the Psalms,—­works truly to be called inspired, because the same divine power which worked in those who produced them works no longer,—­as if to show us, that, after this primitive age, we Indo-Europeans must feel these works without attempting to re-make them; and that our poetry, if it tries to make itself simply the organ of the religious sentiment, leaves the true course, and must conceal this by not speaking a living language.  The moment it speaks a living language, and still makes itself the organ of the religious sentiment only, as in the German and English hymns, it betrays weakness;—­the weakness of all false tendency.

But if by attending to the Germanism in us English and to its works, one has come to doubt whether we, too, are not thorough Germans by genius and with the German deadness to style, one has only to repeat to oneself a line of Milton,—­a poet intoxicated with the passion for style as much as Taliesin or Pindar,—­to see that we have another side to our genius beside the German one.  Whence do we get it?  The Normans may have brought in among us the Latin sense for rhetoric and style,—­for, indeed, this sense goes naturally with a high spirit and a strenuousness like theirs,—­but the sense for style which English poetry shows is something finer than we could well have got from a people so positive and so little poetical as the Normans; and it seems to me we may much more plausibly derive it from a root of the poetical Celtic nature in us.

Its chord of penetrating passion and melancholy, again, its Titanism as we see it in Byron,—­what other European poetry possesses that like the English, and where do we get it from?  The Celts, with their vehement reaction against the despotism of fact, with their sensuous nature, their manifold striving, their adverse destiny, their immense calamities, the Celts are the prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion,—­of this Titanism in poetry.  A famous book, Macpherson’s Ossian, carried in the last century this vein like a flood of lava through Europe.  I am not going to criticise Macpherson’s Ossian here.  Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious, in the book, as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which on