This something is _style_, and the Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure. Style is the most striking quality of their poetry. Celtic poetry seems to make up to itself for being unable to master the world and give an adequate interpretation of it, by throwing all its force into style, by bending language at any rate to its will, and expressing the ideas it has with unsurpassable intensity, elevation, and effect. It has all through it a sort of intoxication of style,—a _Pindarism_, to use a word formed from the name of the poet, on whom, above all other poets, the power of style seems to have exercised an inspiring and intoxicating effect; and not in its great poets only, in Taliesin, or Llywarch Hen, or Ossian, does the Celtic genius show this Pindarism, but in all its productions:—
The grave of March is this, and this the grave of Gwythyr; Here is the grave of Gwgawn Gleddyfreidd; But unknown is the grave of Arthur.
That comes from the Welsh _Memorials of the Graves of the Warriors_, and if we compare it with the familiar memorial inscriptions of an English churchyard (for we English have so much Germanism in us that our productions offer abundant examples of German want of style as well as of its opposite):—
Afflictions sore long time I bore, Physicians were in vain, Till God did please Death should me seize And ease me of my pain—
if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with the English, which in their _Gemeinheit_ of style are truly Germanic, we shall get a clear sense of what that Celtic talent for style I have been speaking of is.
Or take this epitaph of an Irish Celt, Angus the Culdee, whose _Féliré_, or festology, I have already mentioned; a festology in which, at the end of the eighth or beginning of the ninth century, he collected from ‘the countless hosts of the illuminated books of Erin’ (to use his own words) the festivals of the Irish saints, his poem having a stanza for every day in the year. The epitaph on Angus, who died at Cluain Eidhnech, in Queen’s County, runs thus:—
Angus in the assembly of Heaven, Here are his tomb and his bed; It is from hence he went to death, In the Friday, to holy Heaven.
It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was rear’d; It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was buried; In Cluain Eidhnech, of many crosses, He first read his psalms.