domitable reaction against the despotism of fact.' The Celt is not
melancholy, as Faust or Werther are melancholy, from 'a perfectly definite
motive,' but because of something about him 'unaccountable, defiant and
titanic.' How well one knows these sentences, better even than Renan's,
and how well one knows the passages of prose and verse which he uses to
prove that wherever English literature has the qualities these sentences
describe, it has them from a Celtic source. Though I do not think any of
us who write about Ireland have built any argument upon them, it is well
to consider them a little, and see where they are helpful and where they
are hurtful. If we do not, we may go mad some day, and the enemy root up
our rose-garden and plant a cabbage-garden instead. Perhaps we must
restate a little, Renan's and Arnold's argument.

II

Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine, and could
take a human or grotesque shape and dance among the shadows; and that
deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools,
almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not
less divine and changeable. They saw in the rainbow the still bent bow of
a god thrown down in his negligence; they heard in the thunder the sound
of his beaten water-jar, or the tumult of his chariot wheels; and when a
sudden flight of wild duck, or of crows, passed over their heads, they
thought they were gazing at the dead hastening to their rest; while they
dreamed of so great a mystery in little things that they believed the
waving of a hand, or of a sacred bough, enough to trouble far-off hearts,
or hood the moon with darkness. All old literatures are full of these or
of like imaginations, and all the poets of races, who have not lost this
way of looking at things, could have said of themselves, as the poet of
the _Kalevala_ said of himself, 'I have learned my songs from the music of
many birds, and from the music of many waters.' When a mother in the
_Kalevala_ weeps for a daughter, who was drowned flying from an old
suitor, she weeps so greatly that her tears become three rivers, and cast
up three rocks, on which grow three birch-trees, where three cuckoos sit
and sing, the one 'love, love,' the one 'suitor, suitor,' the one
'consolation, consolation.' And the makers of the Sagas made the squirrel
run up and down the sacred ash-tree carrying words of hatred from the
eagle to the worm, and from the