them, they can receive.

Yet no, it is not for what he thus gives them that such souls love him
most! it is rather because of the emotion which lends to his voice so
touching an accent, it is because he too yearns as they do for something
unattained by him. What an affinity for Christianity had this persecutor
of the Christians! The effusion of Christianity, its relieving tears,
its happy self-sacrifice, were the very element, one feels, for which
his soul longed; they were near him, they brushed him, he touched them,
he passed them by. One feels, too, that the Marcus Aurelius one reads
must still have remained, even had Christianity been fully known to him,
in a great measure himself; he would have been no Justin;--but how would
Christianity have affected him? in what measure would it have changed
him? Granted that he might have found, like the _Alogi_[249] of modern
times, in the most beautiful of the Gospels, the Gospel which has
leavened Christendom most powerfully, the Gospel of St. John, too much
Greek metaphysics, too much _gnosis_;[250] granted that this Gospel
might have looked too like what he knew already to be a total surprise
to him: what, then, would he have said to the Sermon on the Mount, to
the twenty-sixth chapter of St. Matthew? What would have become of his
notions of the _exitiabilis superstitio_, of the "obstinacy of the
Christians"? Vain question! yet the greatest charm of Marcus Aurelius is
that he makes us ask it. We see him wise, just, self-governed, tender,
thankful, blameless; yet, with all this, agitated, stretching out his
arms for something beyond,--_tendentemque manus ripae ulterioris
amore_.[251]

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE CELTS TO ENGLISH LITERATURE[252]

If I were asked where English poetry got these three things, its turn
for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic, for
catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and
vivid way,--I should answer, with some doubt, that it got much of its
turn for style from a Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got much
of its melancholy from a Celtic source; with no doubt at all, that from
a Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic.

Any German with penetration and tact in matters of literary criticism
will own that the principal deficiency of German poetry is in style;
that for style, in the highest sense, it shows but little feeling. Take
the eminent masters of style, the poets who best