Imaginative power is nearly always proportionate to concentration of feeling, and lack of the external development of life.  The limited nature of Greek and Italian imagination is due to the easy expansiveness of the peoples of the South, with whom the soul, wholly spread abroad, reflects but little within itself.  Compared with the classical imagination, the Celtic imagination is indeed the infinite contrasted with the finite.  In the fine Mabinogi of the Dream of Maxem Wledig, the Emperor Maximus beholds in a dream a young maiden so beautiful, that on waking he declares he cannot live without her.  For several years his envoys scour the world in search of her; at last she is discovered in Brittany.  So is it with the Celtic race; it has worn itself out in taking dreams for realities, and in pursuing its splendid visions.  The essential element in the Celt’s poetic life is the adventure—­that is to say, the pursuit of the unknown, an endless quest after an object ever flying from desire.  It was of this that St. Brandan dreamed, that Peredur sought with his mystic chivalry, that Knight Owen asked of his subterranean journeyings.  This race desires the infinite, it thirsts for it, and pursues it at all costs, beyond the tomb, beyond hell itself.  The characteristic failing of the Breton peoples, the tendency to drunkenness—­a failing which, according to the traditions of the sixth century, was the cause of their disasters—­is due to this invincible need of illusion.  Do not say that it is an appetite for gross enjoyment; never has there been a people more sober and more alien to all sensuality.  No, the Bretons sought in mead what Owen, St. Brandan, and Peredur sought in their own way,—­the vision of the invisible world.  To this day in Ireland drunkenness forms a part of all Saint’s Day festivals—­that is to say, the festivals which best have retained their national and popular aspect.

Thence arises the profound sense of the future and of the eternal destinies of his race, which has ever borne up the Cymry, and kept him young still beside his conquerors who have grown old.  Thence that dogma of the resurrection of the heroes, which appears to have been one of those that Christianity found most difficulty in rooting out.  Thence Celtic Messianism, that belief in a future avenger who shall restore Cambria, and deliver her out of the hands of her oppressors, like the mysterious Leminok promised by Merlin, the Lez-Breiz of the Armoricans, the Arthur of the Welsh. [Footnote:  M. Augustin Thierry has finely remarked that the renown attaching to Welsh prophecies in the Middle Ages was due to their steadfastness in affirming the future of their race. (Histoire de la Conquete d’Angleterre.)] The hand that arose from the mere, when the sword of Arthur fell therein, that seized it, and brandished it thrice, is the hope of the Celtic races.  It is thus that little peoples dowered with imagination revenge themselves on their conquerors.  Feeling themselves to be strong inwardly