okest from thy towers
today; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert comes; it howls in
thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield. Let the blast
of the desert come! we shall be renowned in our day."

All Europe felt the power of that melancholy; but what I wish to point
out is, that no nation of Europe so caught in its poetry the passionate
penetrating accent of the Celtic genius, its strain of Titanism, as the
English. Goethe, like Napoleon, felt the spell of Ossian very
powerfully, and he quotes a long passage from him in his _Werther_.[263]
But what is there Celtic, turbulent, and Titanic about the German
Werther, that amiable, cultivated and melancholy young man, having for
his sorrow and suicide the perfectly definite motive that Lotte cannot
be his? Faust, again, has nothing unaccountable, defiant, and Titanic in
him; his knowledge does not bring him the satisfaction he expected from
it, and meanwhile he finds himself poor and growing old, and balked of
the palpable enjoyment of life; and here is the motive for Faust's
discontent. In the most energetic and impetuous of Goethe's creations,--
his _Prometheus_,[264]--it is not Celtic self-will and passion, it is
rather the Germanic sense of justice and reason, which revolts against
the despotism of Zeus. The German _Sehnsucht_ itself is a wistful, soft,
tearful longing, rather than a struggling, fierce, passionate one. But
the Celtic melancholy is struggling, fierce, passionate; to catch its
note, listen to Llywarch Hen in old age, addressing his crutch:--

"O my crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the water-flag
yellow? Have I not hated that which I love?

O my crutch! is it not winter-time now, when men talk together after
that they have drunken? Is not the side of my bed left desolate?

O my crutch! is it not spring, when the cuckoo passes through the air,
when the foam sparkles on the sea? The young maidens no longer love me.

O my crutch! is it not the first day of May? The furrows, are they not
shining; the young corn, is it not springing? Ah! the sight of thy
handle makes me wroth.

O my crutch! stand straight, thou wilt support me the better; it is very
long since I was Llywarch.

Behold old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head to my
teeth, to my eyes, which women loved.

The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me together,--
coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow.

I am old, I am