How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he was brought forth —

after Byron’s:-

Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen —

take this of Southey’s, in answer to the question whether he would like to have his youth over again:-

Do I regret the past? 
Would I live o’er again
The morning hours of life? 
Nay, William, nay, not so! 
Praise be to God who made me what I am,
Other I would not be.

There we have the other side of our being; the Germanic goodness, docility, and fidelity to nature, in place of the Celtic Titanism.

The Celt’s quick feeling for what is noble and distinguished gave his poetry style; his indomitable personality gave it pride and passion; his sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature.  The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in romance.  They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are nature’s own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and Latin poetry.  Now of this delicate magic, Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress, that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts. {133} Magic is just the word for it,—­the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature,—­that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism,—­that the Germans had; but the intimate life of nature, her weird power and her fairy charm.  As the Saxon names of places, with the pleasant wholesome smack of the soil in them,—­Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford,—­are to the Celtic names of places, with their penetrating, lofty beauty,—­ Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon,—­so is the homely realism of German and Norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature.  Gwydion wants a wife for his pupil:  ‘Well,’ says Math, ’we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers.  So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw.  And they baptized her, and gave her the name of Flower-Aspect.’  Celtic romance is full of exquisite touches like that, showing the delicacy of the Celt’s feeling in these matters, and how deeply nature lets him come into her secrets.  The quick dropping of blood is called ’faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest.’  And thus is Olwen described:  ’More yellow was her hair than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemony amidst the spray of the meadow fountains.’  For loveliness it would be hard to beat that; and for magical clearness and nearness take the following:-