They could never have known any Celts save when living in embryo with
other Teutons.'
Very likely Lord Strangford is right, but the proposition with which
he begins is at variance with what the text quoted by Zeuss alleges.
{133} Rhyme,--the most striking characteristic of our modern poetry
as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to our
poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its romantic
element,--rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show,
comes into our poetry from the Celts.
{136} Take the following attempt to render the natural magic
supposed to pervade Tieck's poetry: --'In diesen Dichtungen herrscht
eine geheimnissvolle Innigkeit, ein sonderbares Einverstandniss mit
der Natur, besonders mit der Pflanzen--und Steinreich. Der Leser
fuhlt sich da wie in einem verzauberten Walde; er hort die
unterirdischen Quellen melodisch rauschen; wildfremde Wunderblumen
schauen ihn an mit ihren bunten schnsuchtigen Augen; unsichtbare
Lippen kussen seine Wangen mit neckender Zartlichkeit; hohe Pilze,
wie goldne Glocken, wachsen klingend empor am Fusse der Baume;' and
so on. Now that stroke of the hohe Pilze, the great funguses, would
have been impossible to the tact and delicacy of a born lover of
nature like the Celt, and could only have come from a German who has
hineinstudirt himself into natural magic.
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