The English Lyric 23 



In our modern literature we get from the Celt our love of wild 

 nature, not perchance of meadow-green and the springtide glee 

 of birds, but of nature in wider sweep, tameless impulse. The 

 Celtic imagination never hesitates, its sympathy is limitlessly 

 expansive. I know of no finer-poised image than in Ossian's 

 (Macpherson's Ossian) address to the sun, "thou tremblest at 

 the gates of the West ", — seizing and vivifying that instant of 

 luminous hesitancy when the sun quivers upon the verge of the 

 western wave, as if timorously reluctant, ere it plunges beneath 

 the dark waters. And what loftier in prophetic sadness than 

 in that same poem, — 



Thou art perchance, like me, born for a season ; 



Thy years will have an end ; 



Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds, careless of the voice of the morning. 



Again, the passion for beauty is surely Celtic — for beauty 

 unspoiled by morals and moralizing. Keats is unmistakably 

 foretold in the Cymric bard's 



The beautiful I sang of, I will sing! 



And as unmistakably Keats echoes again the airiness and fairi- 

 ness, the magic and music and mystery of bardic poetry. In 



.... magic casements, opening on the foam 

 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. . . . 



Arnold finds the authentic note of Celticism. But it is not in 

 Keats alone. Perhaps no verses of his great romantic contempo- 

 raries are oftener quoted than Coleridge's 



.... woman wailing for her demon lover . . . 



and Wordsworth's 



.... old unhappy far-off things, 

 And battles long ago. 



And in these, too, the Celticism is surely unmistakable and 

 authentic. 



Beauty and sympathy: the detail, the tenderness and vividness, 

 the richness and radiance of our nature poetry, come from the 



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