Page:Studies of a Biographer 2.djvu/96

 present those vivid phrases into which the very greatest men—the Dantes or Shakespeares—can infuse their very life-blood. In his Essays upon Celtic Literature—perhaps the most delightful of his books—Arnold says that English poetry derived three things mainly from Celtic sources: its turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic. The distinction is indicated with admirable fineness; and my perceptions are not quite fine enough to follow it. Keats, Arnold is able to perceive, is looking at nature like a Greek when he asks

but becomes Celtic when he speaks of

Possibly: but I am shy of endeavouring to discriminate these exquisite essences, and I will not attempt to say whether it is the power of style or of magic, whether it is the presence of a Greek or a Celtic mode of looking at nature, that charms us in what is perhaps Arnold's masterpiece, the 'Scholar Gipsy,' Whether the exquisite concluding stanzas, for example, be an instance