The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild flowers,
are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life and grace
there; they are nature's own children, and utter her secret in a way
which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters,
and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now of this delicate magic,
Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress, that it seems impossible
to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts. {133}
Magic is just the word for it,--the magic of nature; not merely the
beauty of nature,--that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an
honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism,--that the Germans had;
but the intimate life of nature, her weird power and her fairy charm.
As the Saxon names of places, with the pleasant wholesome smack of
the soil in them,--Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford,--are to the
Celtic names of places, with their penetrating, lofty beauty,--
Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon,--so is the homely realism of German
and Norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature.
Gwydion wants a wife for his pupil: 'Well,' says Math, 'we will
seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out
of flowers. So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms
of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from
them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw.
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