SOURCE: On the Study of Celtic Literature, Smith, Elder, and Co., 1867, pp. 151-54.

Below, Arnold maintains that even when Macpherson's Ossian is stripped of all forgery and modernity, he still contains "the very soul of Celtic genius. "

… [If,] by attending to the Germanism in us English and to its works, one has come to doubt whether we, too, are not thorough Germans by genius and with the German deadness to style, one has only to repeat to oneself a line of Milton,—a poet intoxicated with the passion for style as much as Taliesin or Pindar,—to see that we have another side to our genius beside the German one. Whence do we get it? The Normans may have brought in among us the Latin sense for rhetoric and style,—for, indeed, this sense goes naturally with a high spirit and a strenuousness like theirs,—but the sense...