Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of
strangers. They have but fallen before us, for one day we must fall.
Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest
from thy towers to-day; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert
comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn
shield. Let the blast of the desert come! we shall be renowned in
our day.'
All Europe felt the power of that melancholy; but what I wish to
point out is, that no nation of Europe so caught in its poetry the
passionate penetrating accent of the Celtic genius, its strain of
Titanism, as the English. Goethe, like Napoleon, felt the spell of
Ossian very powerfully, and he quotes a long passage from him in his
Werther. But what is there Celtic, turbulent, and Titanic about the
German Werther, that amiable, cultivated, and melancholy young man,
having for his sorrow and suicide the perfectly definite motive that
Lotte cannot be his? Faust, again, has nothing unaccountable,
defiant and Titanic in him; his knowledge does not bring him the
satisfaction he expected from it, and meanwhile he finds himself poor
and growing old, and baulked of the palpable enjoyment of life; and
here is the motive for Faust's discontent. In the most energetic and
impetuous of Goethe's creations,--his Prometheus,--it is not Celtic
self-will and passion, it is rather the Germanic sense of justice and
reason, which revolts against the despotism of Zeus.
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