Do not let us wish that the Celt had had less
sensibility, but that he had been more master of it. Even as it is,
if his sensibility has been a source of weakness to him, it has been
a source of power too, and a source of happiness. Some people have
found in the Celtic nature and its sensibility the main root out of
which chivalry and romance and the glorification of a feminine ideal
spring; this is a great question, with which I cannot deal here. Let
me notice in passing, however, that there is, in truth, a Celtic air
about the extravagance of chivalry, its reaction against the
despotism of fact, its straining human nature further than it will
stand. But putting all this question of chivalry and its origin on
one side, no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous
exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus
peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy;
he has an affinity to it; he is not far from its secret. Again, his
sensibility gives him a peculiarly near and intimate feeling of
nature and the life of nature; here, too, he seems in a special way
attracted by the secret before him, the secret of natural beauty and
natural magic, and to be close to it, to half-divine it. In the
productions of the Celtic genius, nothing, perhaps, is so interesting
as the evidences of this power: I shall have occasion to give
specimens of them by-and-by.
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