in us that our
productions offer abundant examples of German want of style as well as
of its opposite):--

"Afflictions sore long time I bore,
Physicians were in vain,
Till God did please Death should me seize
And ease me of my pain--"

if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with the English, which
in their _Gemeinheit_ of style are truly Germanic, we shall get a clear
sense of what that Celtic talent for style I have been speaking of is.

* * * * *

Its chord of penetrating passion and melancholy, again, its _Titanism_
as we see it in Byron,--what other European poetry possesses that like
the English, and where do we get it from? The Celts, with their vehement
reaction against the despotism of fact, with their sensuous nature,
their manifold striving, their adverse destiny, their immense
calamities, the Celts are the prime authors of this vein of piercing
regret and passion,--of this Titanism in poetry. A famous book,
Macpherson's _Ossian_,[262] carried in the last century this vein like a
flood of lava through Europe. I am not going to criticize Macpherson's
_Ossian_ here. Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry,
spurious, in the book, as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you
like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which on the strength of
Macpherson's _Ossian_ she may have stolen from that _vetus et major
Scotia_, the true home of the Ossianic poetry, Ireland; I make no
objection. But there will still be left in the book a residue with the
very soul of the Celtic genius in it, and which has the proud
distinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic genius into
contact with the genius of the nations of modern Europe, and enriched
all our poetry by it. Woody Morven, and echoing Sora, and Selma with its
silent halls!--we all owe them a debt of gratitude, and when we are
unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse forget us! Choose any one of
the better passages in Macpherson's _Ossian_ and you can see even at
this time of day what an apparition of newness and power such a strain
must have been to the eighteenth century:--

"I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate. The fox
looked out from the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round her
head. Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers.
They have but fallen before us, for one day we must fall. Why dost thou
build the hall, son of the winged days? Thou lo