Little by little, in what seems the most spontaneous fiction, a more comprehensive study of the sources of poetry and romance begins to disclose a cause for each fancy, a story of inherited materials from which each province of the poet's land has been shaped and built over and peopled. [189] In _Primitive Culture_, vol. i., page 273. The Celtic Revival, the renascence of wonder in Ireland, has done more than anything else to awaken modern love for antiquity, to bring over into literature the legends of gods and men "Beyond the misty space Of twice a thousand years." While the movement concerns itself more with poetry and the drama than with prose,--Ireland has been likened to "a nest of singing birds," though the voices of some have been sadly silenced of late--yet fiction has felt its influence as well. The land of the immortals glooms and gleams again for us in storied vision, and the ancient past yields up to us its magic, its laughter, its tears. These romances are written, not in pedestrian prose as ordinary folk-tales, but with a bardic beauty that gives to style the lifting wings of verse. Each fact and figure is expressed in poetic symbols, which Yeats calls "streams of passion poured about concrete forms." A sense of ancient, divine powers is in every bush and bog, every lake and valley. Ireland has enriched universal fancy and the effect on literature will perhaps never be lost. * * * * * One of the most interesting aspects of folk-loristic supernaturalism is that concerned with nature. The primitive mind needs no scientific proof for theories of causation, since, given a belief in gods, it can manage the rest for itself. With the Celts there is ever a feeling of nature as a mighty personality. Every aspect, every phase of her power is endowed with life and temperament. Celtic pantheism saw in every form a spirit, in every spring or cloud or hill-top, in every bird or blossom some unearthly divinity of being. A primrose is vastly more than a yellow primrose, but one of "the dear golden folk"; the hawthorn is the barking of hounds, leek is the tear of a fair woman, and so on, which poetic speech bears a likeness to the Icelandic court poetry. This figurative sense suggests "an _after-thought_ of the old nature-worship lingering yet about the fjords and glens where Druidism never was quite overcome by Christianity." It lends to the Celtic folk-tales their wild, unearthly beauty, their passionate poetry and mystic symbolism akin to the classic mythology and such as we find in no other folk-literature of the present time.