United States or Angola ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They hated the slowness and dulness of the creeping Saxon; it offended their clear, strenuous talent for affairs, as it offended the Celt's quick and delicate perception. The Normans had the Roman talent for affairs, the Roman decisiveness in emergencies. They have been called prosaic, but this is not a right word for them; they were neither sentimental, nor, strictly speaking, poetical.
He warmed to his subject, leaned forward, fixed eager eyes on his friend, laid a hand on Bohannan's knee. "We've all done the conventional thing, long enough. Now we're going to do the unconventional thing. We've been all through the known. Now we're going after the unknown. And Hell is liable to be no name for it, I tell you that!" The Celt's eyes were alight with swift, eager enthusiasm.
The tall, dark-eyed, beautiful Celt, attainted in blood and brain by generations of famine and drink, alternating with the fervid sensuousness of the girl, her Saxon sense of right alternating with the Celt's hereditary sense of revenge, his dreamy patriotism, his facile platitudes, his acceptance of literature as a sort of bread basket, his knowledge that he is not great nor strong, and can do nothing in the world but love his country; and as he passes his thirtieth year the waxing strong of the disease, nervous disease complex and torturous; to him drink is at once life and death; an article is bread, and to calm him and collect what remains of weak, scattered thought, he must drink.
He never went to bed under midnight after calling on either of them, and, having the Celt's natural aptitude to get at the soul of either women or intricate mechanism, in a year he was engaged to both; but naturally enough a brain fever overtook him, and he lay on a cot at the Sisters' Hospital and jabbered strange things.
So is it with the Celtic race; it has worn itself out in taking dreams for realities, and in pursuing its splendid visions. The essential element in the Celt's poetic life is the adventure that is to say, the pursuit of the unknown, an endless quest after an object ever flying from desire. It was of this that St.
Magic is the word to insist upon, a magically vivid and near interpretation of nature; since it is this which constitutes the special charm and power of the effect I am calling attention to, and it is for this that the Celt's sensibility gives him a peculiar aptitude. But the matter needs rather fine handling, and it is easy to make mistakes here in our criticism.
She had none of a Frenchwoman's gift for ignoring social differences, and she had the uneasy pride that is rare in a Celt, although she had all a Celt's taste for refinement and show and glitter. Miss Carew sat more and more stiffly at the tea-table, until she confided frankly to Molly "My dear, I am too old, and I am simply in the way.
And Ludovic Gordon bowed low over Marget's worn hand as if she had been a queen. Marget lifted Plato, and it seemed to me that day as if the dignity of our Lady of Sorrows had fallen upon her. "This is the buik George chose for you, Maister Maclean, for he aye said to me ye hed been a prophet and shown him mony deep things." The tears sprang to the Celt's eyes.
Mr. Morris reverted for an hour to his fourteenth century, a period when London was "clean." This is a poetic license; many a plague found mediaeval London abominably dirty! A Celt himself, no doubt, with the Celt's proverbial way of being impossibilium cupitor, Mr.
Novalis or Ruckert, for instance, have their eye fixed on nature, and have undoubtedly a feeling for natural magic; a rough-and-ready critic easily credits them and the Germans with the Celtic fineness of tact, the Celtic nearness to nature and her secret; but the question is whether the strokes in the German's picture of nature have ever the indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of the Celt's touch in the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakspeare's touch in his daffodil, Wordsworth's in his cuckoo, Keats's in his Autumn, Obermann's in his mountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy among the Swiss farms.
Word Of The Day