That calm grand brow the son of Ægir eyed.
Ægir, the God of the Ocean, the Scandinavian Neptune.
And bloodstain'd altars cursed the mountain sod.
The testimony to be found in classical writers as to the original purity of the Druid worship, before it was corrupted into the idolatry which existed in Britain at the time of the Roman conquest, is strongly corroborated by the Welsh triads. These triads, indeed, are of various dates, but some bear the mark of a very remote antiquity—wholly distinct alike from the philosophy of the Romans and the mode of thought prevalent in the earlier ages of the Christian era; in short, anterior to all the recorded conquests over the Cymrian people. These, like proverbs, appear the wrecks and fragments of some primæval ethics, or philosophical religion. Nor are such remarkable alone for the purity of the notions they inculcate relative to the Deity; they have often, upon matters less spiritual, the delicate observation, as well as the profound thought, of reflective wisdom. It is easy to see in them how identified was the Bard with the Sage—that rare union which produces the highest kind of human knowledge. Such, perhaps, are the relics of that sublimer learning which, ages before the sacrifice of victims in wicker idols, won for the Druids the admiration of the cautious Aristotle, as ranking among the true enlighteners of men—such the teachers who (we may suppose to have) instructed the mystical Pythagoras; and furnished new themes for meditation to the musing Brahman. Nor were the Druids of Britain inferior to those with whom the Sages of the western and eastern world came more in contact. On the contrary, even to the time of Cæsar, the Druids of Britain excelled in science and repute those in Gaul; and to their schools the Neophytes of the Continent were sent.
In the Stanzas that follow the description of the more primitive Cymrians, it is assumed that the rude Druid remains now existent (as at Stonehenge, &c.), are coeval only with the later and corrupted state of a people degenerated to idol-worship, and that the Cymrians previously possessed an architecture, of which no trace now remains, more suited to their early civilization. If it be true that they worshipped the Deity only in his own works, and that it was not until what had been a symbol passed into an idol, that they deserted the mountain-top and the forest for the temple, they would certainly have wanted the main inducement to permanent and lofty architecture. Still it may be allowed, at least to a poet, to suppose that men so sensible as the primitive Saronides, would have held their schools and colleges in places more adapted to a northern climate than their favourite oak groves.
And wing'd the shaft of Scythian Abaris.
The arrow of Abaris (which bore him where he pleased) is supposed by some to have been the loadstone. And Abaris himself has been, by some ingenious speculators, identified with a Druid philosopher.