But the world which they created still lives in that marvellous cycle of legends which gather round the name of King Arthur, and which, in our own day, has given to the first of our living poets the worthiest subject which our island could furnish—the career of the stainless king and his gallant knights, which our children and our children’s children will read with their souls more and more raised to nobler and higher thoughts. The rocks and seas on which we look from Holyhead—“the shaggy top of Mona high,”—the wide bay “where Deva spreads her wizard stream,” inspired in Milton some of his wildest and most pathetic strains in speaking of his loved companion Lycidas, who was lost off these very coasts. The solid prosaic sense of the Saxon is necessary; the energy and enterprise of the Norman is useful; have been indispensable to the greatness of Britain; but do not forget the romance and the song and the sentiment of the mountains and the minstrels of Wales. Leave a corner in your minds for the visions of other days. Remember that there are things in heaven and earth more than our plain homely English philosophy has dreamed of. Such innocent, beautiful stories and thoughts, from whatever quarter they come, though not in themselves religious, yet smooth and purify the course of life. They prepare us for the poetry of parables like the Pilgrim’s Progress—they prepare us for the poetry of the Psalms and of the Prophets of the Bible. As these mountains, these bays, these rocks, which gave to us in their early days our poetic and romantic thoughts, have, in these later days, given to us our quarries and our harbours and our lighthouses and our piers, so it is that out of every generous and inspiring thought there may come at last the most solid, the most useful, the most comprehensive materials of God’s glory and man’s usefulness. (2) There is another aspect of this element in the national character of the old Celtic races.