delicate magic, Celtic romance is so
pre-eminent a mistress, that it seems impossible to believe the power
did not come into romance from the Celts.[270] Magic is just the word
for it,--the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature,--that the
Greeks and Latins had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a
faithful realism,--that the Germans had; but the intimate life of
Nature, her weird power and her fairy charm. As the Saxon names of
places, with the pleasant wholesome smack of the soil in them,--
Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford,--are to the Celtic names of places,
with their penetrating, lofty beauty,--Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon,--
so is the homely realism of German and Norse nature to the fairy-like
loveliness of Celtic nature. Gwydion wants a wife for his pupil: "Well,"
says Math, "we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a
wife for him out of flowers. So they took the blossoms of the oak, and
the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and
produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that
man ever saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name of
Flower-Aspect."[271] Celtic romance is full of exquisite touches like
that, showing the delicacy of the Celt's feeling in these matters, and
how deeply Nature lets him come into her secrets. The quick dropping of
blood is called "faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of
reed-grass upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest." And
thus is Olwen described: "More yellow was her hair than the flower of
the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer
were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemony
amidst the spray of the meadow fountains."[272] For loveliness it would
be hard to beat that; and for magical clearness and nearness take the
following:--

"And in the evening Peredur entered a valley, and at the head of the
valley he came to a hermit's cell, and the hermit welcomed him gladly,
and there he spent the night. And in the morning he arose, and when he
went forth, behold, a shower of snow had fallen the night before, and a
hawk had killed a wild-fowl in front of the cell. And the noise of the
horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted upon the bird. And
Peredur stood and compared the blackness of the raven, and the whiteness
of the snow, and the redness of the blood, to the hair of the lady whom
best he loved, which was blacker