the vivid impression of her magic, accompanied by the sorrowful feeling that man knows, when, face to face with her, he believes that he hears her commune with him concerning his origin and his destiny.  The legend of Merlin mirrors this feeling.  Seduced by a fairy of the woods, he flies with her and becomes a savage.  Arthur’s messengers come upon him as he is singing by the side of a fountain; he is led back again to court; but the charm carries him away.  He returns to his forests, and this time for ever.  Under a thicket of hawthorn Vivien has built him a magical prison.  There he prophesies the future of the Celtic races; he speaks of a maiden of the woods, now visible and now unseen, who holds him captive by her spells.  Several Arthurian legends are impressed with the same character.  Arthur himself in popular belief became, as it were, a woodland spirit.  “The foresters on their nightly round by the light of the moon,” says Gervais of Tilbury, [Footnote:  An English chronicler of the twelfth century.] “often hear a great sound as of horns, and meet bands of huntsmen; when they are asked whence they come, these huntsmen make reply that they are of King Arthur’s following.” [Footnote:  This manner of explaining all the unknown noises of the wood by Arthur’s Hunting is still to be found in several districts.  To understand properly the cult of nature, and, if I may say so, of landscape among the Celts, see Gildas and Nennius, pp. 131, 136, 137, etc. (Edit.  San Marte, Berlin. 1884);] Even the French imitators of the Breton romances keep an impression—­although a rather insipid one—­of the attraction exercised by nature on the Celtic imagination.  Elaine, the heroine of Lancelot, the ideal of Breton perfection, passes her life with her companions in a garden, in the midst of flowers which she tends.  Every flower culled by her hands is at the instant restored to life; and the worshippers of her memory are under an obligation, when they cut a flower, to sow another in its place.

The worship of forest, and fountain, and stone is to be explained by this primitive naturalism, which all the Councils of the Church held in Brittany united to proscribe.  The stone, in truth, seems the natural symbol of the Celtic races.  It is an immutable witness that has no death.  The animal, the plant, above all the human figure, only express the divine life under a determinate form; the stone on the contrary, adapted to receive all forms, has been the fetish of peoples in their childhood.  Pausanias saw, still standing erect, the thirty square stones of Pharse, each bearing the name of a divinity.  The men-hir to be met with over the whole surface of the ancient world, what is it but the monument of primitive humanity, a living witness of its faith in Heaven? [Footnote:  It is, however, doubtful whether the monuments known in France at Celtic (men-hir. dot-men, etc.) are the work of the Celts.  With M. Worsaae and the Copenhagen archaeologists, I am inclined to think that these monuments belong to a more ancient humanity.  Never, in fact, has any branch of the Indo-European race built in this fashion. (See two articles by M. Merimee in L’Athenaum franfais, Sept. 11th, 1852, and April 25th, 1853.)]