wave and leaves and
the song of the cuckoo speak the same word, as if all came from the same
heart of things; and, through it all, the remembrance: 'God will not
undo what he is doing'; have indeed, and supremely, the 'Celtic note.'
'I love the strand, but I hate the sea,' says the _Black Book of
Carmarthen_, and in all these poems we find a more than mediaeval hatred
of winter and cold (so pathetic, yet after all so temperate, in the
Latin students' songs), with a far more unbounded hatred of old age and
sickness and the disasters which are not bred in the world, but are a
blind part of the universe itself; older than the world, as old as
chaos, out of which the world was made.

Yet, wild and sorrowful as so much of this poetry is, with its praise of
slaughter and its lament over death, there is much also of a gentle
beauty, a childlike saying over of wind and wave and the brightness in
the tops of green things, as a child counts over its toys. In the 'Song
of Pleasant Things' there is no distinction between the pleasantness of
sea-gulls playing, of summer and slow long days, of the heath when it is
green, of a horse with a thick mane in a tangle, and of 'the word that
utters the Trinity.' 'The beautiful I sang of, I will sing,' says
Taliesin; and with him the seven senses become in symbol 'fire and
earth, and water and air, and mist and flowers, and southerly wind.' And
touches of natural beauty come irrelevantly into the most tragical
places, like the 'sweet apple-tree of delightful branches' in that song
of battles and of the coming of madness, where Myrddin says: 'I have
been wandering so long in darkness and among spirits that it is needless
now for darkness and spirits to lead me astray.' The same sense of the
beauty of earth and of the elements comes into those mysterious
riddle-rhymes, not so far removed from the riddle-rhymes which children
say to one another in Welsh cottages to this day: 'I have been a tear in
the air, I have been the dullest of stars; I was made of the flower of
nettles, and of the water of the ninth wave; I played in the twilight, I
slept in purple; my fingers are long and white, it is long since I was a
herdsman.'

And now, after looking at these characteristics of Welsh poetry, look at
Ossian, and that 'gaze fixed on formless and distant shadows,' which
seemed so impressive and so Celtic to Lamartine. 'In the morning of
Saturday,' or 'On Sunday, at the time of dawn, there was a great