at all, is perfected in us.  We have neither more time for experiments, nor a desire to go forth in search of pastures newf We cling to our friends, to those proved by long intercourse.  Old wine, old books, old friends.  We say to ourselves with Voltaire in these delightful lines:—­“Let us enjoy, let us write, let us live, my dear Horace!...I have lived longer than you:  my verse will not last so long.  But on the brink of the tomb I shall make it my chief care—­to follow the lessons of your philosophy—­to despise death in enjoying life—­to read your writings full of charm and good sense—­as we drink an old wine which revives our senses.”

In fact, be it Horace or another who is the author preferred, who reflects our thoughts in all the wealth of their maturity, of some one of those excellent and antique minds shall we request an interview at every moment; of some one of them shall we ask a friendship which never deceives, which could not fail us; to some one of them shall we appeal for that sensation of serenity and amenity (we have often need of it) which reconciles us with mankind and with ourselves.

THE POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES

BY ERNEST RENAN

TRANSLATED BY W. G. HUTCHISON

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Ernest Renan was born in 1823, at Treguier in Brittany.  He was educated for the priesthood, but never took orders, turning at first to teaching.  He continued his studies in religion and philology, and, after traveling in Syria on a government commission, he returned to Paris and became professor of Hebrew in the College de France, from which he was suspended for a time on account of protests against his heretical teachings.  He died in 1892.

Renan’s activity divides itself into two parts.  The first culminated in his two great works on the “Origins of Christianity” and on the “History of Israel.”  As to the scientific value of these books there is difference of opinion, as was to be expected in a treatment of such subjects to the exclusion of the miraculous.  But the delicacy and vividness of his portraits of the great personalities of Hebrew history, and the acuteness of his analysis of national psychology, are not to be denied.

The other part of his work is more miscellaneous, but most of it is in some sense philosophical or autobiographical.  Believing profoundly in scientific method, Renan was unable to find in science a basis for either ethics or metaphysics, and ended in a skepticism often ironical, yet not untinged with mysticism.

“He was an amazing writer,” says M. Faguet, “and disconcerted criticism by the impossibility of explaining his methods of procedure; he was luminous, supple, naturally pliant and yielding; beneath his apparently effeminate grace an extraordinary strength of character would suddenly make itself felt; he had, more than any nineteenth-century writer, the quality of charm; he exercised a caressing innuence which enveloped, and finally conquered, the reader.”