The impulse given by the first literary awakening continued in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales for two or three centuries, until the confusion and disintegration of the Norse invasions put an end to it. During this early and brilliant period the Celt poured forth the richest treasures of his nature. Before the foe triumphed, many valuable pieces of literature, including the heroic sagas, had been committed to writing, and thus preserved for posterity, though it is known that much was destroyed by the reckless invader. It was a bright morning—this dawn of letters—too suddenly clouded and overcast. For a century or two after, the Celtic field in its various parts remained singularly barren and unproductive. Ireland was not altogether without poets and scholars, though greatly fallen from her pristine glory, but in Wales, from the middle of the seventh century till the year 1080, hardly any poetry of merit was produced, and the same might be said of Scotland, and, it would appear, of Brittany also. No illustrious bards or outstanding writers redeemed the general dearth of the tenth century. That was the darkest hour before another brilliant dawn. Ossian, St. Patrick, and Columcille; Dubthach and King Laoghaire; Prince Arthur and his knights; Taliessin and the Royal Urien, Aneurin, Llywarch Hên; what were these but memories? vanished heroes and bards of the past. Already the walls of Balclutha were desolate, the harp hung mute in Tara’s hall; nay, Tara itself was now a simulacrum,—a ruin, deserted for ever. And even from Caerleon and Dun-Reged had not the glory departed? Too soon the sun, late-risen, had sunk upon the unhappy Celts, defeated in war and now dumb and helplessly inarticulate in literature. It seemed as if, swan-like, the pathetic remnants of this old race had at length sung their dying song, and sunk into silent and finished oblivion. To such a pass to all appearance, through Carlyle’s “star-fire and immortal tears,” had Destiny led these hapless peoples by the advent of the tenth century, that he would be a visionary indeed who should prophesy any renaissance, and a true seer, for the time being, who should say— ... Look Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there. Yet, phœnix-like, is it not ever the fate of the hidden and precarious Celtic genius to rearise from its ashes and reassert its vitality? And so in the eleventh and twelfth centuries there was such a wonderful literary awakening throughout Celtdom, that it was as when:— ... A sable cloud Turns forth her silver lining on the night. And this new activity, be it noted, was not confined to the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland, but, as in the sixth century, comprehended the Cymri of Wales and Brittany also.