It is this which he who deals with the Welsh remains in
a philosophic spirit wants to know. Where is the force, for
scientific purposes, of telling us that certain incidents by which
Welsh poetry has been supposed to indicate a surviving tradition of
the doctrine of transmigration, are found in Irish poetry also, when
Irish poetry has, like Welsh, its roots in that Celtism which is said
to have held this doctrine of transmigration so strongly? Where is
even the great force, for scientific purposes, of proving, if it were
possible to prove, that the extant remains of Welsh poetry contain
not one plain declaration of Druidical, Pagan, pre-Christian
doctrine, if one has in the extant remains of Breton poetry such
texts as this from the prophecy of Gwenchlan: 'Three times must we
all die, before we come to our final repose'? or as the cry of the
eagles, in the same poem, of fierce thirst for Christian blood, a cry
in which the poet evidently gives vent to his own hatred? since the
solidarity, to use that convenient French word, of Breton and Welsh
poetry is so complete, that the ideas of the one may be almost
certainly assumed not to have been wanting to those of the other.
The question is, when Taliesin says, in the Battle of the Trees: 'I
have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form.
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