Thence ensues its sadness.  Take the songs of its bards of the sixth century; they weep more defeats than they sing victories.  Its history is itself only one long lament; it still recalls its exiles, its flights across the seas.  If at times it seems to be cheerful, a tear is not slow to glisten behind its smile; it does not know that strange forgetfulness of human conditions and destinies which is called gaiety.  Its songs of joy end as elegies; there is nothing to equal the delicious sadness of its national melodies.  One might call them emanations from on high which, falling drop by drop upon the soul, pass through it like memories of another world.  Never have men feasted so long upon these solitary delights of the spirit, these poetic memories which simultaneously intercross all the sensations of life, so vague, so deep, so penetrative, that one might die from them, without being able to say whether it was from bitterness or sweetness.

The infinite delicacy of feeling which characterises the Celtic race is closely allied to its need of concentration.  Natures that are little capable of expansion are nearly always those that feel most deeply, for the deeper the feeling, the less it tends to express itself.  Thence we have that charming shamefastness, that veiled and exquisite sobriety, equally far removed from the sentimental rhetoric too familiar to the Latin races, and the reflective simplicity of Germany, which are so admirably displayed in the ballads published by M. de la Villemarque.  The apparent reserve of the Celtic peoples, often taken for coldness, is due to this inward timidity which makes them believe that a feeling loses half its value if it be expressed; and that the heart ought to have no other spectator than itself.

If it be permitted us to assign sex to nations as to individuals, we should have to say without hesitance that the Celtic race, especially with regard to its Cymric or Breton branch, is an essentially feminine race.  No human family, I believe, has carried so much mystery into love.  No other has conceived with more delicacy the ideal of woman, or been more fully dominated by it.  It is a sort of intoxication, a madness, a vertigo.  Read the strange Mabinogi of Peredur, or its French imitation Parceval le Gallois; its pages are, as it were, dewy with feminine sentiment.  Woman appears therein as a kind of vague vision, an intermediary between man and the supernatural world.  I am acquainted with no literature that offers anything analogous to this.  Compare Guinevere or Iseult with those Scandinavian furies Gudrun and Chrimhilde, and you will avow that woman such as chivalry conceived her, an ideal of sweetness and loveliness set up as the supreme end of life, is a creation neither classical, nor Christian, nor Teutonic, but in reality Celtic.