Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/116

 charm, of the pensive, spiritual memories that cling and cluster round its hills and valleys, its villages and its homesteads. I cannot here quote Welsh poetry, but your own historian, John Richard Green, was fully cognisant of this Celtic strain:—

"Prince Howel is a noble troubadour, the author of delicate and gay love poetry. If he sang as a patriot that he hated England as 'a flat, inactive land,' and that he loved Gwynedd with its sea-coast and mountains, its towns on the forest border, its fair landscape, its dales and valleys, its white sea-mews, still the praise of beauteous women ran through all the strain. 'I love its fields covered with white trefoil, I love the Marches of Merioneth where my head was pillowed on a snow-white arm.'"

This love of the country, of country life, the love of one's kindred people, the sense of nationality, its rights and duties, its holy hopes and great possibilities, all these Celtic instincts make war on materialism, and while they last, they will lighten, sweeten, and ennoble your great civilisation.