active views of the future
state, and held them with such earnestness, that they wept around
the newborn infant and smiled around the corpse; that they
encountered death without fear or reluctance. This reversal of
natural sentiments shows the tampering of a priesthood who had
motives.

A somewhat more minute conception of the Druidic view of the
future life is furnished us by an old mythologic tale of Celtic
origin.2 Omitting the story, as irrelevant to our purpose, we
derive from it the following ideas. The soul, on being divested of
its earthly envelop, is borne aloft. The clouds are composed of
the souls of lately deceased men. They fly over the heads of
armies, inspiring courage or striking terror. Not yet freed from
terrestrial affections, they mingle in the passions and affairs of
men. Vainly they strive to soar above the atmosphere; an
impassable wall of sapphire resists their wings. In the moon,
millions of souls traverse tremendous plains of ice, losing all
perception but that of simple existence, forgetting the adventures
they have passed through and are about to recommence. During
eclipses, on long tubes of darkness they return to the earth, and,
revived by a beam of light from the all quickening sun, enter
newly formed bodies, and begin again the career of life. The disk
of the sun consists of an assemblage of pure souls swimming in an
ocean of bliss. Souls sullied with earthly impurities are to be
purged by repeated births and probations till the last stain is
removed, and they are all finally fitted to ascend to a succession
of spheres still higher than the sun, whence they can never sink
again to reside in the circle of the lower globes and grosser
atmosphere.

1 Book ii. ch. 14.

2 Davies, Celtic Researches, appendix, pp. 558-561.

These representations are neither Gothic nor Roman, but Celtic.

But a far more adequate exposition of the Druidic doctrine of the
soul's destinies has been presented to us through the translation
of some of the preserved treasures of the old Bardic lore of
Wales. The Welsh bards for hundreds of years were the sole
surviving representatives of the Druids. Their poems numerous
manuscripts of which, with apparent authentication of their
genuineness, have been published and explained contain quite full
accounts of the tenets of Druidism, which was nowhere else so
thoroughly systematized and established as in ancient Britain.3
The curious reader will find this whole su