[270] Rhyme,—the most striking characteristic of our modern poetry as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to our poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its romantic element— rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, comes into our poetry from the Celts.[Arnold.] A different explanation is given by J. Schipper, A History of English Versification, Oxford, 1910: "End-rhyme or full-rhyme seems to have arisen independently and without historical connection in several nations…. Its adoption into all modern literature is due to the extensive use made of it in the hymns of the church."
[271] Lady Guest's Mabinogion, Math the Son of Mathonwy, ed. 1819, III, 239.
[272] Mabinogion, Kilhwch and Olwen, II, 275.
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[273] Mabinogion, Peredur the Son of Evrawc, I, 324.
[274] Mabinogion, Geraint the Son of Erbin, II, 112.
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[275] ~Novalis~. The pen-name of ~Friedrich von Hardenberg~ (1772-1801), sometimes called the "Prophet of Romanticism." See Carlyle's essay on Novalis.
[276] For ~Rückert~, see Wordsworth, Selections, Note 4, p. 224. [Transcriber's note: This is Footnote 356 in this e-text.]
[277] Take the following attempt to render the natural magic supposed to pervade Tieck's poetry: "In diesen Dichtungen herrscht eine geheimnissvolle Innigkeit, ein sonderbares Einverständniss mit der Natur, besonders mit der Pflanzen-und Steinreich. Der Leser fühlt sich da wie in einem verzauberten Walde; er hört die unterirdischen Quellen melodisch rauschen; wildfremde Wunderblumen schauen ihn an mit ihren bunten sehnsüchtigen Augen; unsichtbare Lippen küssen seine Wangen mit neckender Zärtlichkeit; hohe Pilze, wie goldne Glocken, wachsen klingend empor am Fusse der Bäume"; and so on. Now that stroke of the hohe Pilze, the great funguses, would have been impossible to the tact and delicacy of a born lover of nature like the Celt; and could only have come from a German who has hineinstudirt himself into natural magic. It is a crying false note, which carries us at once out of the world of nature-magic, and the breath of the woods, into the world of theatre-magic and the smell of gas and orange-peel.[Arnold.]