The mass of a stock must supply our data for judging the stock. But see, moreover, what I have said at p. 100. {120} Lord Strangford’s note on this is:—‘The Irish monks whose bells and books were found in Iceland could not have contributed anything to the old Norse spirit, for they had perished before the first Norseman had set foot on the island. The form of the old Norse poetry known to us as Icelandic, from the accident of its preservation in that island alone, is surely Pan-Teutonic from old times; the ar and method of its strictly literary cultivation must have been much influenced by the contemporary Old-English national poetry, with which the Norsemen were in constant contact; and its larger, freer, and wilder spirit must have been owing to their freer and wilder life, to say nothing of their roused and warring paganism. 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 Einverständniss mit der Natur, besonders mit der Pflanzen—und Steinreich. Der Leser fühlt sich da wie in einem verzauberten Walde; er hört die unterirdischen Quellen melodisch rauschen; wildfremde Wunderblumen schauen ihn an mit ihren bunten schnsüchtigen Augen; unsichtbare Lippen küssen seine Wangen mit neckender Zärtlichkeit; _hohe Pilze_, _wie goldne Glocken_, _wachsen klingend empor am Fusse der Bäume_;’ 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. It is a crying false note, which carries us at once out of the world of nature-magic and the breath of the woods, into the world of theatre-magic and the smell of gas and orange-peel.