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After we had left Sainte Menehould the sense of the nearness and all-pervadingness of the war became even more vivid. Every road branching away to our left was a finger touching a red wound: Varennes, le Four de Paris, le Bois de la Grurie, were not more than eight or ten miles to the north. Along our own road the stream of motor-vans and the trains of ammunition grew longer and more frequent.

With them it was weighted, darkened, distorted, rendered ineffective and deprived of its force by a thousand things which they also held to be religious, and every whit as important as mercy and judgment. It is necessary to qualify this judgment, but it does bring out the all-pervadingness of Law in Judaism.

But this much is true, I think: out of this poetry, the occasional intelligible flashes of it, rings out a much greater note than any I know of in our Welsh literature since: a sense of much profounder, much less provincial things: the Grand Manner, of which we have had echoes since, in the long centuries of our provincialism; but only I think echoes; but you shall find something more than echoes of it, say in Llywarch Hen, in a sense of heroic uplift, of the titanic unconquerableness that is in the Soul; and in Taliesin, in a sense of the wizardly all-pervadingness of that Soul in space and time: Now Math he was a famous wizard of old means 'sort, 'kind'; and so implies such ideas as 'differentiation, 'heterogeneity. To say that you were enchanted by Math before you became immortal, is as much as to say that before the great illumination, the initiation, one is under the sway of this illusionary world of separatenesses; as for being 'enchanted by Gwydion, that name is, I suppose, etymologically the same as the Sanskrit Vidya, or Budha; he is the 'Purifier' of those 'Five Battalions of 'Celfyddon, the word is 'artists, 'skillful ones'; but again I imagine, it is connected with the word Celi, 'occult' or 'secret'; so that being 'enchanted by' him would mean simply, being initiated into the Occult Wisdom.