than the raven, and to her skin, which
was whiter than the snow, and to her two cheeks which were redder than
the blood upon the snow appeared to be."[273]

And this, which is perhaps less striking, is not less beautiful:--

"And early in the day Geraint and Enid left the wood, and they came to
an open country, with meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the meadows.
And there was a river before them, and the horses bent down and drank
the water. And they went up out of the river by a steep bank, and there
they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his neck; and he had a
small blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the mouth of the
pitcher."[274]

And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek in its clear beauty,
is suddenly magicalized by the romance touch,--

"And they saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one-half of which
was in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and
in full leaf."

Magic is the word to insist upon,--a magically vivid and near
interpretation of nature; since it is this which constitutes the special
charm and power of the effect I am calling attention to, and it is for
this that the Celt's sensibility gives him a peculiar aptitude. But the
matter needs rather fine handling, and it is easy to make mistakes here
in our criticism. In the first place, Europe tends constantly to become
more and more one community, and we tend to become Europeans instead of
merely Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians; so whatever aptitude or
felicity one people imparts into spiritual work, gets imitated by the
others, and thus tends to become the common property of all. Therefore
anything so beautiful and attractive as the natural magic I am speaking
of, is sure, nowadays, if it appears in the productions of the Celts, or
of the English, or of the French, to appear in the productions of the
Germans also, or in the productions of the Italians; but there will be a
stamp of perfectness and inimitableness about it in the literatures
where it is native, which it will not have in the literatures where it
is not native. Novalis[275] or Rueckert,[276] for instance, have their
eye fixed on nature, and have undoubtedly a feeling for natural magic; a
rough-and-ready critic easily credits them and the Germans with the
Celtic fineness of tact, the Celtic nearness to nature and her secret;
but the question is whether the strokes in the German's picture of
nature[277] have ever the inde