twenty years later the English completed the conquest of Wales,
and dealt her highly promising literary culture a blow from which
it is only now perhaps beginning to recover. In the eleventh,
twelfth, and thirteenth centuries the great Sung artists of China
were painting infinity or their square feet of silk: painting
Natural Magic as it has never been painted or revealed since. In
those same centuries the Welsh bards were writing the Natural
Magic of the Mabinogion, one of the chief European repositories
of Natural Magic; and filling a remarkable poetical literature
with the same quality:--and that before the rest of Europe
had, for the most part, awakened to the spiritual impulses
that lead to civilization. In the seventh and eighth centuries,
when continental Europe was in the dead vast and middle of
pralaya, Chinese poetry, under Tang Hsuan-tsong and his great
predecessors, was in its Golden Age--a Golden Age comparable to
that of Pericles in Athens. In the seventh and eighth centuries,
Ireland was sending out scholars and thinkers as missionaries to
all parts of benighted Europe: Ireland in her golden age, the
one highly cultured country in Christendom, was producing a
glorious prose and poetry in the many universities that starred
that then by no means distressful island. In 420, China, after a
couple of centuries of anarchy, began to re-establish her
civilization on the banks of the Yangtse. In 410, the Britons
finally threw off the Roman yoke, and the first age of Welsh
poetry, the epoch of Arthur and Taliesin, which has been the
light of romantic Europe ever since, began.

Does it not seem as if that great Far Eastern note could not
be struck without this little far western note vibrating in
sympathy? Very faintly; not in a manner to be heard clearly by