‘I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate. The fox looked out from the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round her head. 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. The German _Sehnsucht_ itself is a wistful, soft, tearful longing, rather than a struggling, fierce, passionate one. But the Celtic melancholy is struggling, fierce, passionate; to catch its note, listen to Llywarch Hen in old age, addressing his crutch:— O my crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the water-flag yellow? Have I not hated that which I love? O my crutch! is it not winter-time now, when men talk together after that they have drunken? Is not the side of my bed left desolate? O my crutch! is it not spring, when the cuckoo passes through the air, when the foam sparkles on the sea? The young maidens no longer love me. O my crutch! is it not the first day of May? The furrows, are they not shining; the young corn, is it not springing? Ah! the sight of thy handle makes me wroth. O my crutch! stand straight, thou wilt support me the better; it is very long since I was Llywarch. Behold old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head to my teeth, to my eyes, which women loved. The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me together,—coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow. I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from me; the couch of honour shall be no more mine: I am miserable, I am bent on my crutch.