CHAPTER V WALES MONTH BY MONTH |
January I The road ran for ten miles between mountains on which the woods of oak and fir moaned, though there was little wind. A raven croaked with a fat voice. I could hear a score of streams. But the valley would not speak with me. The sole joy in it was that of walking fast and of seeing the summits of the hills continually writing a wild legend on the cloudy sky. The road curved and let in the poor sunlight from the south-west; and there were interminable oak woods ahead,—one moan and one dull cloud. But, suddenly, a space of the south-west sky was silver white. The sun was almost visible, and, suddenly, a company of oak trees caught the light and shone, and became warm and glorious, but misty and impenetrable with light. They dreamed of summers to come and summers past. For one moment they were as fine and strange and chosen from all the rest, as things discovered by a lantern on a country road at night. Not only were they impenetrable to the sight, but it was impossible to suppose oneself amongst them. They were holding festival, but not for me. They were populous, but not with men. They were warm and welcoming, and something was happy there. They were as a large, distant, and luminous house seen in a cold and windy night by some one hungry, poor, timid, and old, upon a lonely road, envying it with an insatiable envy that never dreams of satisfying itself. But, in a moment, a mist arose from the grass between the oaks and me: the glory departed: and the little, draughty farmhouse was far more to be desired than they, where a soft-voiced motherly girl of twenty gave me cheese and bread and milk, and smiled gently at the folly of walking on such a day. SUNNY FIELD, NEAR LLANBERIS II All day I wandered over an immense, bare, snowy mountain which had looked as round as a white summer cloud, but was truly so pitted and scarred and shattered by beds of streams and valleys full of rotten oak trees, that my course wound like a river's or like a mouse's in a dense hedge. The streams were small, and, partly frozen, partly covered up by snow, they made no noise. Nothing made any noise. There was a chimney-stack clearly visible ten miles away, and I wished that I could hear the factory hiss and groan. No wind stirred among the trees. Once a kite flew over among the clouds of the colour of young swan's plumage, but silently, silently. I passed the remains of twelve ancient oaks, like the litter of some uncouth, vast monster pasturing, but without a sound. The ruins of a farm lay at the edge of one valley: snow choked the chimney and protected the hearth, which was black with flames long dead, and as cold as a cinerary urn of the bronze age. I stumbled over something snowy near by, and exposed the brown fragments of a plough, and farther on, a heavy wheel standing askew on its crumbling axle. The trees below were naked on one side of their boles, but above was the snow, like a stiff upright mane on every branch, which seemed to have forced them into their wild and painful curves. All the fallen rotten wood broke under my foot without a sound, and the green things disclosed were as some stupid, cheerful thing in a house of tremendous woe. It was impossible to think of the inn to which I was going, and hardly of the one which I had left. How could their fires have survived the all-pervading silent snow? When one is comfortable, near a fire or within reach of one, and in company, winter is thought of as a time of activity, of glowing faces, of elements despised, and even a poetry book brings back the spring: one will run, or eat chestnuts, or read a book, or look at a picture to-morrow, and so the winter flies. But on the mountain there was no activity; it was impertinent: there was the snow. When I could remember anything it was these verses, which were the one survival from the world I had known before I began to cross this immense, bare, snowy mountain: The beams flash on And make appear the melancholy ruins Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships; Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms and spears, And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels Of scythÉd chariots, and the emblazonry Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts, Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin! The wrecks beside of many a city vast, Whose population which the earth grew over Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie, Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons, Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes Huddled in grey annihilation, split, Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these, The anatomies of unknown winged things, And fishes which were isles of living scale, And serpents, bony chains, twisted around The iron crags, or within heaps of dust To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs Had crushed the iron crags; and over these The jagged alligator, and the might Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores, And weed-overgrown continents of earth, Increased and multiplied like summer worms On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe Wrapped deluge round it like a cloke, and they Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God Whose throne was in a comet, passed, and cried Be not! They lay beneath; the snow was over them. It was hard to walk while all things had thus, in Asiatic phrase, perfected their repose. When the distant chimney appeared again, it was as incredible as a thing seen in a dream when one knows that it is a dream. It interrupted the perfection of the whole, as I did, but only as the smell of a mouse may spoil the beauty of an old room which has been left for a dead man alone, for some time after the funeral. The farther I went, the more immense became the extent of hills ahead and around. Their whiteness made the sky gloomy, as if with coming night. The furthest were grey with distance. In the cold that overtook my swiftest walking I could not put by the imagination that I could see myself travelling over more endless white hills, lost, to my own knowledge, and yet beyond my own power to save. And, again, I thought of all the hills beyond those I saw, until even the immensity before me became more awful, because it suggested the whole, as the light of one candle by the organist suggests the whole cathedral at midnight. And then, though I did not know it, a change began, and dimly, not hopefully, as when one thinks one hears the double click of a latch in a house which strangers inhabit now, I saw that the sun began to set, and it was red. I knew that red: it belonged to the old world: it was the colour of the oast houses in Kent. A window, two miles off, caught the light and blazed. A bell told the hour in a church, and shook some of the snow from the belfry in a mist. I warmed myself in the breath of a flock of sheep. I knew that I heard the voice of a stream which had been with me for a long way. Borrow, I remembered, knew the stream. Borrow! I was at home again. WELSH FARM, NEAR LLANBERIS Slowly the fire and the ale constructed the world again, and though I could still see the snow from the hearth of the inn, it was as impotent as the frail moon which was convoyed down among the moorlands by dark and angry clouds, while I read—as now my reader does—this passage from Wild Wales:— "'I suppose you follow some pursuit besides bardism?' said I; 'I suppose you farm?' "'I do not farm,' said the man in grey. 'I keep an inn.' "'Keep an inn?' said I. "'Yes,' said the man in grey. 'The —— Arms at L——.' "'Sure,' said I, 'inn-keeping and bardism are not very cognate pursuits?' "'You are wrong,' said the man in grey; 'I believe the awen, or inspiration, is quite as much at home at the bar as in the barn, perhaps more. It is that belief which makes me tolerably satisfied with my position and prevents me from asking Sir Richard to give me a farm instead of an inn.' "'I suppose,' said I, 'that Sir Richard is your landlord?' "'He is,' said the man in grey, 'and a right noble landlord too.' "'I suppose,' said I, 'that he is right proud of his tenant?' "'He is,' said the man in grey, 'and I am right proud of my landlord, and will here drink his health. I have often said that if I were not what I am, I should wish to be Sir Richard.' "'You consider yourself his superior?' said I. "'Of course,' said the man in grey; 'a baronet is a baronet, but a bard is a bard, you know. I never forget what I am, and the respect due to my sublime calling. About a month ago I was seated in an upper apartment, in a fit of rapture; there was a pen in my hand and paper before me on the table, and likewise a jug of good ale, for I always find that the awen is most prodigal of her favours when a jug of good ale is before me. All of a sudden my wife came running up and told me that Sir Richard was below, and wanted to speak to me. "Tell him to walk up," said I. "Are you mad?" said my wife. "Do you know who Sir Richard is?" "I do," said I; "a baronet is a baronet, but a bard is a bard. Tell him to walk up." Well, my wife went and told Sir Richard that I was writing and could not come down, and that she hoped he would not object to walk up. "Certainly not, certainly not," said Sir Richard. "I shall be only too happy to ascend to a genius on his hill. You may be proud of such a husband, Mrs. W." And here it will be as well to tell you that my name is W.—J. W. of ——. Sir Richard then came up, and I received him with gravity and politeness. I did not rise, of course, for I never forget myself a moment, but I told him to sit down, and added, that after I had finished the pennill (song for the harp) I was engaged upon, I would speak to him. Well, Sir Richard smiled and sat down, and begged me not to hurry myself, for that he could wait. So I finished the pennill, deliberately, mind you, for I did not forget who I was, and then turning to Sir Richard, entered upon business with him.' "'I suppose Sir Richard is a very good-tempered man?' said I. "'I don't know,' said the man in grey. 'I have seen Sir Richard in a devil of a passion, but never with me. No, no! trust Sir Richard for not riding the high horse with me. A baronet is a baronet, but a bard is a bard, and that Sir Richard knows.'" The which Borrovianism should as much delight my hard-working reader as it did me, on that January night: may it console him also. February I I passed through a village where I found that the old-fashioned bidding marriage was not dead. For a printed sheet with this announcement (in Welsh) fell into my hands: Inasmuch as we intend entering the state of wedlock on ——, we invite wedding gifts, which will be repaid with thanks on a like occasion. T. Williams. Elizabeth Jones. It is expected that gifts due to them, and to their parents and brothers, will be paid on the wedding day. SNOWDON FROM LLANBERIS LAKE The custom was old; the village was new, and it stood on the edge of a strange new land. Having passed it, the road dipped among sublime black hills of refuse from furnace and pit. The streams were rich with yellow water, purple water. Here and there were dim, shining, poisonous heaps of green and blue, like precious stones. There were railway lines everywhere, and on them trucks, full of scraps of metal, like sheaves of scimitars and other cruel weapons—still cruel, but hacked, often rusty, and expressing something more horrible than mere sharpness and ferocity. There were furnaces, crimson and gold; and beyond all, a white-clouded sky which said that it was over the sea. In the early afternoon a grey mist invested all things, so that even when I was close to them, they seemed about to pass away, and I was tempted to walk regardless and straight ahead as the harper did in the tale. It is told that a harper was asked to play and sing at a wedding. It was a fine day, and on his way he sometimes played over the melodies he most liked; and as he went, the fairies followed him, their little feet going fast and sharp like drumsticks. When he reached the house, the fairies were still behind him. They followed him in, and presently, since he again tuned his harp, the company began to dance, and the fairies with them; the house, which was a little one, did not impede them; and in no long time they all went dancing out of the house. The fairies, it is said, were not to be distinguished from the bridal party. They went on across well-known country, regardless and straight ahead, through a barn where men were threshing, through a hall where men were dining. Coming at last to a place he did not know, the harper ceased and became separated from the rest, and slept. When he awoke, he found himself in a pleasant place among very little people, and all that was asked of him was that he should play on the harp every night. Then one day he got leave to go out of the land of the fairies; but he left his harp there and could never get back again. He found that the others had returned. He could say nothing of the wedding day, except that he had never before harped so well. And well did the mist harp. It was the one real credible thing among those furnaces, which were but as gaps in it, or as landscapes seen rapidly from small windows in a lofty house upon a hill. II Next day I crossed the river. At first, the water seemed as calm and still as ice. The boats at anchor, and doubled by shadow, were as if by miracle suspended in the water. No ripple was to be seen, though now and then one emitted a sudden transitory flame, reflected from the sun, which dreamed half-way up the sky in a cocoon of cloud. No motion of the tide was visible, though the shadows of the bridge that cleared the river in three long leaps, trembled and were ever about to pass away. The end of the last leap was unseen, for the further shore was lost in mist, and a solitary gull spoke for the mist. A sombre, satanic family of what had yesterday been the chimneys of factories rose out of the mist,—belonging to a remote, unexplored, inaccessible country over there, which seemed to threaten the river-side where I stood. But the tide was rising, and the thin long wavering line of water grew up over the mud, and died, and grew up again, curved like the grain of a chestnut or mother-of-pearl, and fascinating, persuasive. And sometimes the line of water resembled a lip, quivering with speech, and yet silent, unheard. Two swans glimmered at the edge; and beneath them, in the water, and beside them, on the polished mud, their white reflections glimmered. Suddenly the tantara of a trumpet stung me like an enormous invisible wasp, and I looked down and saw a grey, drowned dog at my feet. His legs lay in pairs; his head curved towards his fore-legs, his tail towards his hind-legs. He was of the colour of the mud. But his very quietness and powerlessness and abjectness, without any consideration of all the play and strife and exercise that once led him step by step towards death,—without a thought of the crimson tongue that once flickered, after hunting or fighting, like a flame of pure abandoned vitality,—gave me a strange suggestion of power and restraint, just as the misty land over the water, without any consideration of all the men and machinery that were visible there yesterday, suggested a life without those things. The beast became a puissant part of the host of all the dead or motionless or dreaming things, of statuary and trees and dead or inefficient men, and was, with them, about to convince me of a state quite other than ours, and not worse, when once again the trumpet disturbed me and turned me to the thought that I was the supreme life-giver to these things, that I gave them of myself, and that without me they were nothing; and I feared that this fancied state was but suggested by my envy of calm things, and that, though dreams may put the uttermost parts of the earth into our possession, without the dream the dreamer is nothing more than naught. III Thence I went to an irregular, squalid, hideous, ashen town,—a large village, but noisy and without character, neither English nor Welsh. The street songs were but a week or two behind those of London, and they were not mixed with anything but an occasional Welsh hymn tune or "Sospan bach." But there used to be an old house there that spoke of old Wales, and I went to see it. When I came to the edge of its garden I heard a blackbird sing, and in the busy street how old and far away it sounded! as if it were true that "thrice the age of a man is that of a stag, and thrice that of a stag is that of the melodious blackbird." Pretentious, unpicturesque, fatigued, and silent, the women walked to and fro, between the shops. Now and then an unmarried girl laughed; the others had no such energy. It was more pleasant to be among the men, who were on the other side of the road, many of them standing still, packed close in a half-moon figure that swelled out over the pavement, and watching something. There was nothing gorgeous or adventurous or even elegant in their scrupulous dress; in the old faces either alcoholic or parched, in the waxen faces of the younger; in the voices which seemed to have been copied from the gramophone, their favourite instrument. I liked them for the complete lack of self-consciousness which allowed them to expose quite fearlessly their angular figures, their uninteresting clothes, their heartless, rigid faces that retained smiles for an incredibly short time. They were the equals, in everything but ease, of the labourers whom they were watching. But when I saw at last what they were watching, I thought that I could have rejoiced to have seen them, looking passionate for once, in flames. For, under the direction of a foreman, whose snub nose, bow legs, and double collar made him a sublime and monstrous priest or chief of what was most horrible among the men and women of the street, a band of labourers, without pity, without even ferocity, but mechanically, was demolishing "Quebec," a dignified mid-eighteenth-century house, where for five generations a decent, stable professional family had lived, loved beauty according to its lights, and been graceful in its leisure. The very house had seemed to say, amid its troubled neighbours, as Marlowe's Edward said, This life contemplative is heaven. SNOWDON FROM CAPEL CURIG LAKE—SUMMER EVENING Now it was falling in thunders and clouds of ruin; and I wondered that the people did not fall upon the enormous, red-haired, passionless men who wielded the pickaxes. For twenty years I had known "Quebec" and had watched the streets creeping upon it, until the house and great garden were surrounded and spied upon by houses on all sides but one. That one side had been protected by a lofty and massive wall, and through that the enemy had now broken an entrance. Behind that wall, the two Alderneys had grazed on three acres of meadow, in the midst of which had been an old orchard, and in the midst of that the gardens and the house. Once I had seen a girl with the delicate Kentish rake gathering a little hay there. In one corner, too, had been a tangle of elder and bramble, which (so we used to fancy) might possibly have—by pure and unbroken descent, miraculously escaping all change—the sap of Eden in their veins. But the Alderneys were gone, and the meadow was slashed with ruts; the trees were down; the air was foul with dust of mortar and brick and plaster; and, mocking at the disembowelled house, new bricks, scaffolding, and iron pillars and girders lay round about, among the fallen clouds of ivy, which were torn and dead. Oh, Westminster, Tintern, Godstow, Kidwelly, you have immortality, not indeed in your forms, but in the hearts of men; but "Quebec" dies with me! So I thought and wondered. Hastily broken up, without a grave, without ceremonial, without a becoming interval of desolation in which to spend its tears, and have at least the pleasure of regret, the house, I knew, could not but send forth piteous ghosts to wander up and down,—inops, inhumataque turba,—and round their heads garlands of branches with those terrible buds that were never to be leaves,—until their sorrows and ours were smoothed by time or consumed by death. I met them afterwards in spring, when the purple of the brambles should have been at last overcome by green, and they seemed the sole inhabitants of the brand-new, crowded streets, beneath which "Quebec" is buried. Suddenly I met Philaster, who had years ago rung the great bell of the house and become the angry coachman's willing captive, so that he might see the house quite close, and the flowers and the grass. Between us we made the power of the breaker and builder as naught. For a little while, indeed, we asked, What would other children do who lived in that suburb, and had no "Quebec" to provide a home for all their fancies,—to lend its lawns for bright ladies and brave knights to walk upon,—its borders and bowers to complete the scenery of Hans Andersen,—its grey walls to hide beauty and cruelty, misers and witches, and children crying because of wicked stepmothers? We had set out, as children, to live as if for eternity. Now we would live as if for annihilation to-morrow. We would no longer set our hearts upon anything which the world can destroy. We would set our hearts upon things of the imagination—like "Quebec." So we went up into an attic, and drew the curtains, and lit the fire, and took draughts of long oblivion, and made our sorrows pompous by reading Villon and Catullus and Du Bellay, and the close of Paradise Lost, and the thirteenth book of the Morte Darthur, and Goethe's "Now comes first love and friendship's company," and other things that reminded us of decay and beauty; and not one of them but drew a long echo from the hoary walls of "Quebec" (now safe within our brains). Yet not one of these things, however splendid or tumultuous or tender, was then too splendid or tumultuous or tender for our mood. Nor could one of them stir us so potently as the picture that came often that evening to our minds. Here was the gaudy, dismal, roaring street, its roar sometimes settling into a kind of silence through which the heart longs for voice of woman or bird to penetrate; and there, seen over the high wall, was the old man who owned "Quebec," playing bowls with several happy children in the twilight, and half-hidden by the dense border of hollyhock, red-hot poker, blush roses, nasturtium, and sunflower; and the house itself, looking more distant than it was, in that sweet light, seemed to possess those calm, impregnable high places of the wise, than which, says Lucretius, there is no possession more desirable. March I Just before dawn, I came to a cleft high in the hills, so that I could only see a little copse of oak and hazel, and in the dying moonlight a thousand white islands of cloud and mountain Totus conlucens veste atque insignibus albis. The night had gone, and the day had not come; and the little copse had the serious, brooding air which all things have at that hour, and especially when the land is tender with the first hope of spring and in that reverie— Cette rÊverie Que ne pense À rien. For what I saw seemed but the fragments of something which night had built for its own delight, and as they became clearer and clearer they had more and more the appearance of being unbuilt and dissolved. But, gradually, the birds were let out and they sang. Their songs, on the wintry hill, which I had last visited in summer, broke upon the silence as in summer they never do, like the opening of the door of a room that is empty but has once been gay with fire and books and men; and sweet though the blackbird was, and shrill the missel-thrush, their songs were awful, and said that "a large part of the earth is still in the urn unto us." The grass, which had truly been of no colour, though my urgent memory persuaded me that it was green, began to awake to colour, and, while in the shadow of the copse the dusk was impenetrable, the light reached a knoll where there was dead bracken still. "Colour," said Novalis, "is an effort of matter to become light," and for one moment the grass upon that knoll ceased to strive and was light. A plover that wheeled close by disappeared and was but a glow. I went on, and on a lower slope the ploughman was beginning to plough in the shadow. Grim and worthless looked the work, until I looked round and saw the dawn that was being prepared. But I watched too carefully, for I saw it all. Ever, as it grew, statelier and richer, I said to myself, that in a little while it would be perfected: yet still I watched and I began to think of those who saw it, as I had seen it before, from windows of towns, as they rose for work, or as they douted the candles and put away cards or books, and paused for perhaps a minute, and gazed as they never gazed at human beauty, because, though they revered it, they feared it also, and though they feared it they were fascinated. I thought of those that leapt up at it; those that mourned because they had seen it pass so often before into a common day; those that, on inhospitable roads, saw it and neglected it, or cursed it after a night in which they had drunk their last poor earnings altogether. If it would but last ... I had been looking at it and had not seen it, and when I dropped these thoughts I knew that it was gone, the slowly prepared and solemn dawn which made the splendid spring of that year. II Then I took a path which led out of sight of the white crested mountain and down among larches and oaks. The wind was changing the grass from green to silver, and back again, rhythmically. In the pallid herbage at the edge of the wood it produced many little sounds, the combination of them barely louder than the sound which fancy makes among tombs; and yet that little concert passed into the ear and heart, giving a sympathy with the thousand minute sorrows of the inanimate world and a feeling that is part of the melancholy so importunately intruding on a spring day. But there, too, was trefoil, delicatest herbage of the early year, with its trick of globing and preserving rain upon its foliage, so that it is more delicate still in the grey dawn. One stalk with all its leaf singularly fine and small had grown out of a scar in a teazel stem. So I came into a valley, and there was one white house in it, with a green, glowing, and humming garden, and at the door a woman who might have been the Old Year. It was one of those white houses so fair that in the old time a poet compared a girl's complexion with them, as with lilies and foam. It held all the sun, so that suddenly I knew that in another valley, farther south and farther east, the rooks were making the lanes sleepy with their busy talk; the kingfishers were in pairs on the brooks, whose gentle water was waving and combing the hair of the river moss; the gold of the willow catkin was darkened by bees; over an old root of dock was a heaving colony of gleaming ants; perhaps the chiffchaff had come to the larches and the little green moschatel was in flower with large primroses among the ash stoles in wet woods; and in the splendid moments of the day the poplars seemed to come into the world, suddenly, all purple.... Yet here there was no rich high-hedged lane, no poplar, no noise of rooks, but only a desolate brown moorland crossed by deep swift brooks through which the one footpath ran, and this white house, like a flower on a grave, recalling these memories of other valleys; so that I forgot that near by the birches stood each in a basin of foam from the dripping of mist and rain, and that I had not yet seen a thrush's nest in any hawthorn on those hills. Therefore, I counted that house as lucky for me as the Welshman's hazel-stick in the tale that is told in Iolo Morganwg's life. This is the tale. A Welshman, with a fine hazel-stick in his hand, was once stopped on London Bridge by an Englishman, who asked whence he came. "From my own country," said the Welshman churlishly. "Do not take it amiss," said the Englishman; "and if you will tell me what I ask, and take my advice, it will be much for your good. Under the roots of the tree from which came your stick, there are great treasures of gold and silver; if you can remember the place, and will take me to it, I will make the treasure yours." Now knowing that the fellow was a magician, the Welshman, though at first unwilling to be a party in this strange thing, at length agreed, and went with him to Craig-y-Dinas and showed him the hazel-tree. They dug out the root and found a broad flat stone underneath, which covered the entrance to a cave. They went in, the magician warning the Welshman lest he should touch a bell that hung in the middle of their path. At the spacious further end of the cave, they saw many warriors lying asleep in a circle, with bright armour on, and weapons ready at hand. One of the warriors, refulgent above all the rest, had a jewelled and golden crown along with the shield and battle-axe at his side. At the feet of the warriors, in the middle of the circle, they saw two immense heaps, the one of gold, the other of silver, and the magician told the Welshman that he might take away as much as he could carry from either of the heaps. So he took much gold. The magician took nothing. On their way out of the cave he again warned the Welshman lest he should touch the bell. But should he touch it, said the magician, some of the warriors would surely awake and ask "if it was yet day": to which he must at once answer: "No, sleep thou on," whereupon the warriors would sleep again. And this the Welshman found to be truth when he staggered under his gold and grazed the bell; but remembering the other's words, he said: "Sleep thou on" when the warriors asked if it were day; and they slept. When they had left the cave, and closed the entrance, the magician told the Welshman that he might return to the cave whenever he wished; that the warriors were the knights of King Arthur, and the warrior with the jewelled and golden crown was King Arthur; that they were awaiting the day when the Black Eagle and the Golden Eagle should go to war; for on that day the trembling earth would toll the bell, and at that sound the king and the knights of the king would awake, take their weapons, overthrow the Saxon, recover the island of Britain, and again establish their king at Caerlleon, in justice and in peace and for ever. But the Welshman spent his gold. He went again to the cave; he overloaded his back with gold; he stumbled and the bell rang; he forgot the password. And the knights rose and leaned upon their elbows, and one of them stood up and took away his gold and beat him and thrust him out and closed the mouth of the cave; and though he and many others made all the hill sore with their digging, the cave was not found again. April I For half a day there was now a world of snow, a myriad flakes falling, a myriad rising, and nothing more save the sound of rivers; and now a world of green undulating hills that smiled in the lap of the grey mountains, over which moved large clouds, sometimes tumultuous and grey, sometimes white and slow, but always fringed with fire. When the snow came, the mountains dissolved and were not. When the mountains were born again out of the snow, the snow seemed but to have polished the grass, and put a sharper sweetness in the song of the thrush and the call of the curlew, and left the thinnest of cirrus clouds upon the bare field, where it clung only to the weeds. So, in this dialogue of mountain and snow, nothing was easily remembered or even credible, until I came to the foot of a hill which hazels and oak trees crowned. The snow was disappearing and the light came precipitately through it and struck the hill. All the olive and silver and leaden stems of oak and hazel glowed together and made a warm haze and changed the hill into an early sunset cloud out of which came the cooing of wood-pigeons. The mountains lay round, grey, faint, unimportant, about to pass away; the country that lay between them and the hill was still in mist. So the hill rose up crowned and garlanded like a statue in a great hall of some fair woman of whom one wonders what art can persuade her to stay on that cold pedestal for ever. The wood-pigeons cooed continually; and there was the hill, using all the sunlight, as a chrysanthemum will do in a London street. It lived; it appealed to all the sense and brain together; it was splendid; it was Spring's, and I do not know of anything else that mattered or was, for the time. Very sweet it was to see the world as but a shining green hill and a shining brown wood, with a wood-pigeon for a voice, while all other things that had been were gone like the snow. That there was also a wind I knew only because it brought with it the scent of a farmyard behind: for it had motion but no sound. Something in me was content to see the hill as a monument of Spring that might endure for ever, that the wood-pigeons might coo their song; and saw that it made possible the sound of bells in an evening landscape, of wheat in sheaves, and quiet beeches and doves among them. Yet I climbed to the wood, and saw that last year's leaves were too thick yet for a flower to pierce them; and that same wind had found a brittle, dead ash-tree in which to sing a cold November song; and the pigeons clapped their wings and flew away. And that cold November song made me remember against myself the old legend of the child who played with fairies, but came once with her mother and saw them no more. COMING NIGHT, NEAR BEDDGELERT There were, says the story, at a small harbour belonging to Nefyn, some houses in which several families formerly lived; the houses are there still, but nobody lives in them now. There was one family there to which a little girl belonged; they used to lose her for hours every day; so her mother was very angry with her for being so much away. "I must know," said she, "where you go for your play." The girl answered that it was to Pin-y-Wig, "The Wig point," which means a place to the west of the Nefyn headland; it was there, she said, she played with many children. "They are very nice children,—much nicer," said the child, "than I am." "I must know whose children they are," was the reply; and one day the mother went with her little girl to see the children. It was a distance of about a quarter of a mile to Pin-y-Wig, and after climbing the slope and walking a little along the top they came in sight of the Pin. It is from this Pin that the people of Pen-yr-Allt got water, and it is from there they get it still. Now after coming near the Pin the little girl raised her hands with joy at the sight of the children. "Oh, mother," said she, "their father is with them to-day; he is not with them always; it is only sometimes that he is." The mother asked the child where she saw them. "There they are, mother, running down to the Pin, with their father sitting down." "I see nobody, my child," was the reply, and great fear came upon the mother; she took hold of the child's hand in terror, and it came to her mind at once that they were the Tylwyth Teg. Never afterwards was the little girl allowed to go to Pin-y-Wig: the mother had heard that the Tylwyth Teg exchanged people's children with their own. II Yesterday, the flower of the wood-sorrel and the song of the willow-wren came together into the oak woods, and higher up on the mountain, though they were still grey, the larches were misty and it was clearly known that soon they would be green. The air was full of the bleating of lambs, and though there was a corpse here and there, so fresh and blameless was it that it hardly spoiled the day. The night was one of calm and breathing darkness; nor was there any moon; and therefore the sorrowful darkness and angularity of early spring valleys by moonlight, when they have no masses of foliage to make use of the beams, did not exist. It was dark and warm, and from the invisible orchard, where snow yet lay under the stone wall, came a fragrance which, though it was not May, brought into our minds the song that was made for May in another orchard high among hills: Have you ne'er waked in the grey of the day-dawn Whitely to stand at the window scarce seen, Over the garden to peer in the May-dawn Past to the fruit-close whose pale boughs not green Slowly reveal a fresh faintness a-flutter White to the young grass and pink to the sky? O, then a low call to waking we utter: "Bluth, lasses, apple-bluth spirts low and high." Out, lasses, out, to the apple-garth hasten— Nay, never tarry to net your glad hair— Here are no lovers your kissed shoes to fasten (O, for the days when girls' feet may go bare). O'er the dim lawn the may-rime yet lingers, Pallid and dark as the down of the dawn— Gather your skirts in your delicate fingers, Stoop as you run o'er the almond-hung lawn. Look through the trees ere dawn's twilight is over— Lo, how the light boughs seem lost in the stars; Everywhere bluth the grey sky seems to cover Quivering and scented, new spring's kisses' scars. Wet are the blossoms to wash your faint faces— Bury your faces cheek-deep in their chill; Press the flushed petals and open your dresses— So—let them trickle your young breasts to thrill. Winter has wronged us of sunlight and sweetness, We who so soon must be hid from the sun; Winter is on us as summer's completeness Faint-hearted drops down a tired world undone; Brief is the bloom-time as sleepy maids' laughter Who know not one bed-time 'tis summer's last day. Though from the heart of the rose they have quaffed her. Come, lasses, come, ere our rose world falls grey. We had talked long into the night, and then as sleep came, out of this darkness peered the early timorous warble of a blackbird, and gradually all the birds in orchard, hedge, and wood made a thick mist or curtain of innumerable and indistinguishable notes through which still crept the bolder note of that same nearest blackbird. As the night lost its heaviness, though not its stillness, the continuous mist of songs grew thicker and seemed to produce or to be one with the faint darkness which so soon was to be light. It seemed also to be making the landscape which I saw being made, when I looked out. There, was the side of the hill; there the larches, the dark hedges, and the lingering snow and the orchard: they were what I had seen before, but changed and increased; and very subtle, plaintive, menacing, vast, was the work, though when the light had fully come, once more the larches, the hedges, and the orchard were as if they had never been sung to a new order of beauty by the mist of songs, and yet not the same, any more than a full coffin is the same as the lips and eyes and hands and hair, of which it contains all that we did not love. And still there were many songs; but you could tell who sung each of them, if you wished. III At the end of the month, when already the cuckoo had come and the blackthorn flowers among hawthorn branches were deceiving those who desired May, I went again to the hill where the wood-pigeons had cooed. I sat in a room in sight of it, during a cloud-gathering sunset. The white houses, which had earlier been like remnants of winter snow, were now like flowers. They and the misty larches and the birches gave a nuptial splendour to the old hills. Once more the land stood in preparation, as it stands year after year, so that one might think it expected a new dynasty of gods to come on May day, as often happened in the old time. And in the oaks and hazels the wood-pigeons cooed again. But when the sunset was perfect, they ceased as if they also feared and loved the white and green lines of cloud that lay over the hills—of a white and green which I had only seen together before in a crimpled, tender cabbage cut in two and lying half in bright water for the cook. Then the silence grew and grew, exciting and paining and pleasing and never satisfying the ear; so that I knew not whether the silence or the speech that preceded it was the more mysterious. For him that has ears there is nothing more expressive than speech; but it is never unequivocal as silence is. The two are perhaps handmaidens to one another and inseparable parts in the universal harmony, although Maeterlinck says that a silent child is wiser than Plato eloquent. VIEW OF MOELWYN A cuckoo had been singing, but now I heard it not; no longer did the yellow-ammer insist, the thrush gossip, the blackbird muse; the sounds of the house were dead: and I saw a hundred cows, some lying down, some moving so lazily—like sailing ships on a wide sea—that I could not see the changing of their pattern on the grass, and I was entangled in the unfathomable dream of the unending hills and the unending valleys. In the room hung a landscape of savage hills, cloven by dark shadows and bright streams, and the glass reflected the calm grass and the hill and the oak and hazel woods which thus mingled with the picture at times and made a strange palimpsest of winter and spring. Now one and now the other predominated, until some one came in, as three cuckoos flew crying overhead, and sang this song, which gave the victory to spring:— THE MAIDS OF CAERMARTHENSHIRE Mo-li merch-ed Cym-ru lÂn A fyn y gÂn a'r de - lyn Nid oes de-styn yn un man Mor anwyl gan y bech-gyn, Ac nid oes ferch-ed yn y tir Fel merch-ed Sir Gaer-fyrdd-in. Mae eu gruddiau glÂn i gyd Yn ca-rio gwrid y rho-syn, Ac mae lliw y li-li gun Ar wedd pob un o ho-nyn'; Mae rhos a li - li hardd-a'r tir Ar rudd-iau Sir Gaer-fyrdd-in. And something like these were the Welsh words, which were by Watcyn Wyn: Song and the harp desire to raise To sweet Wales praise for its women; Lads and their hearts have not one theme So dear, no dream so clinging; There are no maidens in the land Like the maiden band of Caermarthen.... Of modest looks and nimble feet, They are just as fleet as the wind's wings; Dearly and lovesomely each floats Red petticoats out farther; They dance it swiftly through the earth, The maids who had birth in Caermarthen.... When men would love they desire the way Of these; for, I say it in earnest, One is worth two or even three Of the usual free brave women. If I take a wife I shall kiss the braids Of one of the maids of Caermarthen. A HAYFIELD NEAR PORTMADOC May I All the morning I had walked among the mountains, and snow had fallen; but gradually I descended, and found a hawthorn standing all white and alone; and, at first, the delicacy of the country had an air of unreality, as if it were but a fancy provoked by the grim, steep, cold heights. Nor, at first, were the small farmhouses quite so real as the crags I remembered. As I approached them, I seemed to be revisiting lands that belonged to a fictitious golden past; but as I came up to them, I was not undeceived, as I should have expected to be. How sweet and grave were the young larches! The brooks were not running as I had heard them up among the hills, but as brooks would run if I read of them at home and at ease in the verses of some tender poet, or as they will when I remember them many years hence. The sound of the world was heard only as the laughter of youthful voices by the trout pools, or again as the pealing of bells that presently grew and swelled and bubbled until the valley in which they pealed overflowed with the sound, and the moment of their ceasing was not marked. So at last I gave up some of the pleasure of sight and hearing and smell under the influence of those very senses. For a fancy came of a kind that is not easily avoided when spring and our readiness for it come together. And the fancy was that I was coming into a land whither had fled the transient desirable things of childhood and early youth. Especially was it the land to which had fled the acquaintances of that time, who were known, perhaps, only for one day—one spring—with whom intimacy began to flower, and then death or some less perfect destroyer intervened and "slit the thin-spun life" and gave an unwithered rose into our keeping—the memory of a laugh, a revelation, a catch of fish. We did not know them long enough to have doubts, self-questionings, the egotistical indulgences in letters and conversations of which we sometimes drink so deep that we taste the lees and know futility. Or they passed away as childish games do: we made an appointment and never kept it, and so we never knuckled the marble or saw the child again. We knew them once, golden-haired, and with laughter which no sigh followed, with clear voices in anger or love. These grow not old! And with them are some of those who were once as they, the friends who were once acquaintances: for who does not pleasantly (or bitterly) remember the first fresh moments when, like a first glass, our friends, with all their best qualities perhaps unknown, were tasted carelessly, the palate quite unsoiled and in no need of the olives of charity; or the moments when, with tastes and aims not yet mutually discovered, we were yet dimly conscious of the end, seeing the whole future under vague light? Some of these we can—and I did—recall as if the happy voices had not died, but had simply made way for harsher or sadder tones, and had fled here to keep an immortality. I heard them on the fresh warm air. And with them hovered those I saw but once—in a crowd, at a wayside inn—and desired; and at my evening inn some empty chairs were not wholly in vain. Thus did the shadow of the mountain fall far over the soft lands below. II All sign of snow had left the hills, when long before sunrise, but not before the east had begun to grow serious with thoughts of dawn, I came upon a rough meadow, where a solitary thorn was white with flower—or of that colour which white is in the dusk. It reminded me of snow, but prettily defying the mountains, it meant all May. And it happened that the day then being born was perfect May. The east opened, and the close-packed, dwarfed hills were driven out of it like sheep, into the gradual light. From that moment until the day passed in a drift of purple and dim cloud, all things were marvellously clear. In the hedges, on the rough meadows, and in the steep wastes under the cliffs, there were hundreds of hawthorns flowering, and yet they were not hundreds, but one and one and one.... They were as a crowd of which we know all the faces, and therefore no crowd at all; and one by one these were to be saluted. Not only the white thorns, but the oaks in the large fields, and even the ashes and alders by the brooks were each distinct. If I had raised my head, I should have seen, indeed, that the mountains were in haze, and that what I had just passed was in haze. But I never saw, or wished to see, for more than a quarter of a mile, and within that distance all things were clear and separate, like books which oneself has handled and known, every one. Even the daffodils under a hazel hedge never became a patch. The women, at gateways or among the cows, stood out like one or two statues in a large vacant hall. One field had in it twelve isolated oak trees, and that they were twelve I saw clearly, and wondered and admired, and never dreamed of thinking of them as just a number of oaks. One by one the footpaths, to left or right, went up to one of the oaks or thorns, and, untrodden, disappeared suddenly. And I could not but recall the lovely clear pictures in old Welsh poetry and story which had on winter nights reminded me of May. And chiefly this, from the Mabinogion, was in my mind. "'I was,' said Kynon, 'the only son of my mother and father, and I was exceedingly aspiring, and my daring was very great. I thought there was no enterprise in the world too mighty for me, and after I had achieved all the adventures that were in my own country, I equipped myself and set forth through deserts and distant regions. And at length it chanced that I came to the fairest valley in the world, wherein were trees of equal growth; and a river ran through the valley, and a path was by the side of the river. And I followed the path until mid-day, and continued my journey along the remainder of the valley until the evening; and at the extremity of an plai I came to a large and lustrous castle, at the foot of which was a torrent. And I approached the castle, and there I beheld two youths with yellow curling hair, each with a frontlet of gold upon his head, and clad in a garment of yellow satin, and they had gold clasps upon their insteps. In the hand of each of them was an ivory bow, strung with the sinews of the stag; and their arrows had shafts of the bone of the whale, and were winged with peacock's feathers; the shafts also had golden heads. And they had daggers with blades of gold, and with hilts of the bone of the whale. And they were shooting their daggers. A LONELY SHORE NEAR PENRHYN DEUDRAETH "'And a little way from them I saw a man in the prime of life, with his beard newly shorn, clad in a robe and a mantle of yellow satin; and round the top of his mantle was a band of gold lace. On his feet were shoes of variegated leather, fastened by two bosses of gold. When I saw him, I went towards him and saluted him, and such was his courtesy that he no sooner received my greeting than he returned it. And he went with me towards the castle. Now there were no dwellers in the castle except those who were in one hall. And there I saw four-and-twenty damsels, embroidering satin at a window. And this I tell thee, Kai, that the least fair of them was fairer than the fairest maid thou hast ever beheld in the Island of Britain, and the least lovely of them was more lovely than Gwenhwyvar, the wife of Arthur, when she has appeared loveliest at the Offering, or on the day of the Nativity, or at the feast of Easter. They rose up at my coming, and six of them took my horse, and divested me of my armour; and six others took my arms, and washed them in a vessel until they were perfectly bright. And the third six spread cloths upon the tables and prepared meat. And the fourth six took off my soiled garments, and placed others upon me; namely, an under vest and a doublet of fine linen, and a robe, and a surcoat, and a mantle of yellow satin with a broad gold band upon the mantle. And they placed cushions both beneath and around me, with coverings of red linen; and I sat down. Now the six maidens who had taken my horse unharnessed him, as well as if they had been the best squires in the Island of Britain. Then, behold, they brought bowls of silver wherein was water to wash, and towels of linen, some green and some white; and I washed. And in a little while the man sat down to the table. And I sat next to him, and below me sat all the maidens, except those who waited on us. And the table was of silver, and the cloths upon the table were of linen; and no vessel was served upon the table that was not either of gold or of silver or of buffalo horn. And our meat was brought to us. And, verily, Kai, I saw there every sort of meat and every sort of liquor that I have ever seen elsewhere; but the meat and the liquor were better served there than I have ever seen them in any other place....'" Only the brain of the man who saw things thus could describe that clear day in May. June I It was a country of deep, calm pastures and slow streams that might have been in England, except that smiling women at the last farm I had passed were talking in Welsh and calling one another Mary Margaret, or Blodwen, or Olwen; and that far off, like a dim thought or a half-forgotten dream, a mountain conversed with the most distant clouds. THE SHORE NEAR HARLECH—AFTERNOON Along my path there had been many oaks and doves among their leaves; and deep hedges that sent bragging stems of briers far out over the footpath, and hid delicate single coils of black bryony in their shadows; and little bridges of ferny stone, and beneath them quiet streams that held flower and tree and cloud in their depth, as if in memory; and great fields where there was nothing, or perhaps a merry, childlike, scampering stoat that pursued a staring, trotting rabbit. I had walked for ten miles and had not seen a man. But it would be more just to ignore such measurements, since the number of milestones was unimportant; so also were the hours. For the country had given me the freedom of time. Dreams of brains that had long been dead became stronger than the strong right hand of to-day and of yesterday. And without asking, these verses sang themselves in my head:— Midways of a walled garden, In the happy poplar land, Did an ancient castle stand, With an old knight for a warden.... Across the moat the fresh west wind In very little ripples went; The way the heavy aspens bent Towards it, was a thing to mind. The painted drawbridge over it Went up and down with gilded chains; 'Twas pleasant in the summer rains Within the bridge-house there to sit. There were five swans that ne'er did eat The water weeds, for ladies came Each day, and young knights did the same, And gave them cakes and bread for meat. I remembered them with a curious sense of being uncontrolled, or, if you will, of being controlled as one is in sleep, and not by friends, railways, clothes, and meals, as one usually is. I had entered that golden age that is always with us, where there are no wars except in the Iliad and Paradise Lost. At one stile, I saw Aeneas,—in mediÆval mail,—revealing a blue-eyed, confident face, with a slippery mouth set firm by his destiny. The country was without obvious character. An artist could have made nothing of it. Nothing in the arrangement of meadow and corn-land, wood and reedy water, made a clear impression on the mind: they might, perhaps, have been rearranged without attracting attention. So the landscape occupied the eyes little and the mind not at all. Wandering over it with no emotion but rest, I made of it what I would. In different moods I might have met there Proserpina, or Camilla, or Imogen. But chiefly I met there the vague persons of poetry, like Shelley's Ione, which are but as large eyes or eloquent lips discerned in fleeting darkness. And I was too deeply lost to be at once rescued by the sight of a dignified, untenanted house, whose shrubberies I wandered into, along a rabbit run as deep as a footpath in the short, hawk-weedy grass. Docks and milk-thistles had not yet overpowered lupin and phlox in the deep borders that still had a tinge of race in their order and luxuriance. The martins of the eaves had added to the pompous portico of the house, so that it had the look of wild rock. The roses had sent up enormous talons from their roots and tyrannised everywhere. There were no flowers in the garden more delicate than the enchanter's nightshade and nipplewort of the shrubbery, and the short wild poppies that could just flower in the old gravel of the paths. For this one moment the wild and the cultivated were at peace together, and the harmony gave the place an unreality,—so that even at the time I had a dim belief that I was in a garden out of a book,—which made it a fit haven for my mood. Then, in a corner, among ruined, ivy-covered elms, I found a stupid, mournful grotto of wildly-shaped stones wildly accumulated: at the threshold lay a penny doll that played a part between comedy and tragedy very well. Going near, I saw, not quite so clearly as I see it now, a long-bearded, miserable man, reclining, with fair, unwrinkled brow and closed eyes and shining teeth. On his long sloping forehead a high-mounted spider dreamed; yet he did not stir. A snake, in a fold of his coat beneath his beard, disregarded the heaving of his chest. His breath filled the grotto as a cow's would have done, and it was sweet. And I turned away suddenly, put to shame by what my soul, rather than my eyes, had recognised as Pan. For I ought to have been prepared and I was not. And as I walked home in an embowered lane, some floating, clashing insects troubled me, and that night, whilst I enjoyed the coming on of sleep, I could not but fancy that I heard the whisper of a god's garment, and wondered had I troubled a god's meditation and walk. II To-day, it is another country, as different from the last as old age from maturity. No longer does the greenfinch in the hawthorn say a hundred times that it has five young ones and is happy. No longer does the perfect grass, seen betwixt the boles of beeches, burn against the sky. For that dream of mountains has come true, and so many and so great are they that I can compare my loneliness only with what I have fancied to be the loneliness of one planet that now is and again is not in a tumultuous, grey, midnight sky, or of a light upon a ship between clouds and angry sea, far off. IN THE WOODS, FARCHYNYS, BARMOUTH ESTUARY The thought of steam and electricity never truly touches the primitive sense of distance; and here, even the milestones among the foxgloves are somewhat insolent, when they say that the town under that farthest hill is thirty miles away; for the hill, unknown to me, is farther away than any place I have ever seen, and I would rather say that it is thirty years away and in the dim future or the dim past. In their shape, there is something human, or suggesting human work, in these hills. Castles, or less noble masonry, noble when fallen, look thus in their ruins, and become thus tricked with delicate verdure and flowers. A great plough driven at random through frosty country would have turned up half-mile clods like these. And at twilight there is a ridge like an extended giant with raised knees and chin thrown back; and often I have seen a horned summit, like a Pan, capture the white moon. This mountain ahead is not only old, but with its uncovered rock and broken boulders and hoary streams and twisted trees, that look as if a child had gathered garlands and put them in play upon the ancient stems, it declares mightily, if vaguely, the immense past which it has seen. There are English hills which remind us that this land also was once in Arcady: they are of a golden age,—the age of Goldsmith, of Walton, of Chaucer if you like, or of Theocritus; but they speak of nothing since; they bear no wrinkles, no wounds, no trophies. But by this mountain you cannot be really at ease until in some way you have travelled through all history. For it has not been as nothing to it that Persia, Carthage, Greece and Rome, and Spain have been great and are not. It has been worn by the footprints of time which have elsewhere but made the grass a little deeper or renewed the woods. It has sat motionless, looking on the world; it has grown wrinkled; it is all memory. Were it and its fellows to depart, we should not know how old we were; for we should have only books. Therefore I love it. It offers no illusions. Its roads are winding and rough. The grass is thin; the shelter scarce; the valley crops moderate; the cheese and mutton good; the water pure; the people strong, kind, intelligent, and without newspapers; the fires warm and bright and large, and throwing light and shadow upon pewter and brass and oak and books. It offers no illusions; for it is clear, as it is not in a city or in an exuberant English county, that the world is old and troubled, and that light and warmth and fellowship are good. Sometimes comes a thought that it is a huge gravestone, so is it worn, so obscure and brief its legend. It belongs to the past, to the dead; and the dead, as they are more numerous, so here they are greater than we, and we only great because we shall one day be of their number. You cannot look at it without thinking that the time will come when it may be, and we are not, nor the races of men— INCOMING TIDE, NEAR BARMOUTH sed haec prius fuere: nunc recondita senet quiete. And hearing an owl among its oak trees, its age was quaintly expounded to me by that passage in the Mabinogion where the Eagle of Gwernabwy seeks a wife. "The Eagle of Gwernabwy had been long married to his wife, and had by her many children. She died, and he continued a long time a widower; but at length he proposed a marriage with the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd. But afraid of her being young, so as to have children by her, and thereby degrade his own family, he first of all went to inquire about her age amongst the aged of the world. Accordingly he applied to the Stag of Rhedynfre, whom he found lying close to the trunk of an old oak, and requested to know the Owl's age. "'I have seen,' said the Stag, 'this oak an acorn, which is now fallen to the ground through age, without either bark or leaves, and never suffered any hurt or strain, except from my rubbing myself against it once a day, after getting up on my legs; but I never remember to have seen the Owl you mention younger or older than she seems to be at this day. But there is one older than I am, and that is the Salmon of Glynllifon.' "The Eagle then applied to the Salmon for the age of the Owl. The Salmon answered, 'I am as many years old as there are scales upon my skin, and particles of spawn within my belly; yet never saw I the Owl you mention but the same in appearance. But there is one older than I am, and that is the Blackbird of Cilgwri.' "The Eagle next repaired to the Blackbird of Cilgwri, whom he found perched upon a small stone, and inquired of him the Owl's age. "'Dost thou see this stone upon which I sit,' said the Blackbird, 'which is now no bigger than what a man can carry in his hand? I have seen this very stone of such weight as to be a sufficient load for a hundred oxen to draw, which has suffered neither rubbing nor wearing, save that I rub my bill on it once every evening, and touch the tips of my wings on it every morning, when I expand them to fly; yet I have not seen the Owl either older or younger than she appears to be at this day. But there is one older than I am, and that is the Frog of Mochno Bog; and if he does not know her age, there is not a creature living that does know it.' "The Eagle went last of all to the Frog, and desired to know the Owl's age. He answered, 'I never ate anything but the dust from the spot which I inhabit, and that very sparingly; and dost thou see these great hills that surround and overawe this bog where I lie? They are formed only of the excrements from my body since I have inhabited this place; yet I never remember to have seen the Owl but an old hag, making that hideous noise Too-hoo-hoo, always frightening the children of the neighbourhood.'" Farther along the road, and not wholly cut off from a world of richer fields, there is the ruin of an abbey, which, being the work of human hands, says the same thing more clearly. It is but a cave of masonry topped by umbrageous ivy that swells over its edge like froth over a tankard. Altar and bells and books and large abbatic oven are gone. Only the jackdaw remains. The winds blow through and through the ruins. There is moss; here are flowers,—yellow cistus and cinque-foil, purple fumitory, pearly eyebright, and still some white stitchwort stars. But nothing dies save what we let die, and here, as in a library, on this once consecrated ground, meet all religions. It has room for the Druid. Its ivy leaves repeat the praises of moon and sun. It will deny no fairy and no god an altar and a place for dancing. I have gone there with many fancies and many memories of books, and there they find a home. And if, as some have done, you go there with willingness and an inability to accept what dreams have hitherto been dreamed, you may seem there,—in favourable hours, when the casements of all the senses are opening wide upon eternity, and all things are silent as fishes, and the curves of bramble and brier among the masonry seem to be thinking,—to be on the edge of a new mythology and to taste the joy of the surmises of him who first saw Pan among the sedges or the olives. July I For three days I walked and drove towards Llyn-y-Fan Fach. On the first day I passed through a country of furnaces and mines, and the country had been exquisitely made. The gently swirling lines of hill and valley spoke of the mountains far off, as the little waves and the foam coming up the shore like chain-mail speak of the breakers out in the bay. Every large field that was left unburdened by house or factory had a fair curve in it, and even the odd pieces of land were something more than building sites and suggested their context. But as we passed through, only the highest points gave the curious eye any satisfaction, since the straight lines of houses, the pits and the heaps of refuse, and the enormous factories, obscured the true form of the land. Even so might some survivor of a deluge look upon the fair land he knew; for we lacked the courage to think of hill and valley as having undergone an inevitable change, which in a century might be known to have brought beauty with it, as changes do. Everything was brand-new, but not fresh. A wanton child might have done it all, had he been large and rich and careless enough to do it thus, nec numero nec honore. Or had it been all built to the music of the organ-grinder whom I met playing, for the joy of playing, "The Absent-minded Beggar"? The staring, mottled houses of various stone and brick, which had no character save what comes of perfect lack of character, might have been made by some neglected boy who had only played with penny trains and motor cars and steamers and bicycles. Phlox and foxglove, and sweet-william and snapdragon, and campanula and amber lilies could not make sweet the "rockeries" of hot-looking waste. The streets, named after factory magnates, had been made in long blocks and broken up by the boy, thoughtlessly. The factories themselves, noble as some of the furnaces were by day and night when sweating men moved to and fro before them, were of the same origin. They were mere cavities, and one marvelled that the smoke from their chimneys was permitted to waver and roll in the same way as clouds the most splendid and august. Many were already in places decayed. That they had been glazed only to have the windows pierced by the stones of happy children was all in their favour that could be seen. Their roofs had fallen in, and neither moss nor ivy had had time to grow thereon; the splintered wood was still new and white. Middle-aged men of fifteen and aged men of thirty were in keeping with their ludicrous senility. A millionaire playing at imitating antiquity could have done no worse. The decay was made in Birmingham. Time had been sweated and had done its work very ill. Here and there, indeed, there were scenes which perhaps an unprejudiced mind would have found sublime. There were pools, for example, filled with delicate grass and goldfish amongst it. They were made yesterday, and yet had they fed little brooks for ages they could not have been more shining and serene as sunset poured all its treasury into their depths. Passing one, soon after dawn, and before the night-workers had left the factory, the reeds in it stood up just so that no storied pool had more the trick of antiquity. Near by, one green field, set amidst houses and a factory, was enclosed by abundant but ill-stretched barbed wire, without gate or possible entrance of any kind. In the middle was a tattered notice, warning trespassers. No cloister was ever more inviolate. The grass grew as it liked, and all whom the heavy headstones of the buildings had spared in the rash burial of rural divinities must there have danced; and the grass shone as if with recent festival, and its emptiness hinted at a recent desertion. All the other fields had been carelessly defaced by broken cheap china and tin kettles and rags, and like cattle that have a day to live and are insulted with the smell of their lucky companions' blood, they were dreary and anxious. Footmarks, but not one footpath, crossed them in all directions.... A Battersea kitchen after Christmas is adorned like this land with similar spoiled toys. Their pathos is the same in kind; but here it is worse, because a grown-up person—the original grandeur and antiquity of the land as shown in the one green field—has burst in and marred the completeness of the children's play. MISTY MORNING, NEAR BARMOUTH II At the edge of one village in this country there was a new public-house, the worst of the buildings in the place, because the most impudent. It glittered and stank and was called "The Prince of Wales." Inside, English and some Welsh voices were singing together all of Britain's most loved songs; perhaps "Dolly Gray" predominated, and in its far-floating melody the world-sorrow found a voice; for a harper played on the harp while they sang. The landlord liked to have the harper there, because he drew customers and kept them, and it was clear that he himself, when he had time, loved music, since he took his pipe out of his mouth to hum the last words of a song about a skylark, a dead mother, and some angels. The next song was "The Rising of the Lark," which begins thus: A LONELY SHORE, BARMOUTH ESTUARY No one sang except the harper; the landlord frowned, remarked that "Evan was very drunk tonight," and offered to stop the song if we objected, and then began to talk. He said that the harper was a poor sort of man; had been a schoolmaster and was a "scholar"; had been to prison for an unmentioned crime; and was now a man with a wife, whom he supported by odd jobs and by "my own charity, for," explained the host, "I let him have his drinks free." He was fond of his harp, as if it had been a horse or a barrel of beer; and boasted, when drunk, that he knew that he was the sixth of his family who had played the harp, and that same harp, and that he was the last of the true harpers. So we went into the taproom and sat down with fourteen miners and the harper, who was doing his best with "God bless the Prince of Wales." "You are fond of your National Anthem," said a voice which might have cut glass and perhaps came from Glasgow. Whereupon, with sublime, gentle anger the harper played and sang the National Anthem of Wales:— Mae hen wlad fy Nhadau yn anwyl i mi, Gwlad beirdd a chantorion, en- wogion o fri; Ei gwrol ry - fel - wyr, gwlad-garw-yr tra mad, Dros ryddid goll-a-sant eu gwaed. Gwlad! Gwlad! pleid - iol wyf i'm Gwlad, Tra mÔr yn fur i'r bur hoff bau, O bydded i'r hen-iaith ba - rhau. VIEW FROM BONTDDU, DOLGELLY The words cannot, of course, be translated, but the following are as much like them as a photograph of Snowdon is like Snowdon. "Dear to me is the old land of my fathers, a land of bards and minstrels of great name. Her brave warriors, best of patriots, poured out their blood for freedom. Ancient and mountainous Wales, Paradise of the bard, every valley and cliff is lovely in my sight; through the feeling of patriotism, how alluring is the ripple on her rivers and brooks. If the enemy treads my country under foot, the old language of the Welsh lives as it used to live; the Muse suffers not, in spite of the horrid hand of the traitor, nor yet the melodious harp of my country." And the chorus says: "My country, my country, I am bound up with my country. While the sea is a boundary to the fair and well-loved place, may the old language last." ... While he sang, we saw that the harper was a little, pale, snub-nosed, asthmatic man, with red hair and a delicate, curved mouth and heavy-lidded, pathetic, sentimental, but unsympathetic grey eyes, and glowing white fingers. He leaned over his instrument as a mother over her child when she is bathing it, or as a tired man reaping with a reaping-hook. He evidently knew what he liked; yet, as the evening wore out, he lost himself sentimentally over the poorest tunes. He seemed to love listening at least as well as playing. Slowly we emptied the house of all its Englishmen by encouraging him to play the airs which the harp had known through all its life. He played the plaintive best. Such quick happiness as "New Year's Eve," which begins— moved his sorrow more and his sentiment less, and his white fingers stuck among the strings. When he rose at 11 P.M. to go, he could carry the harp, but hardly himself; and we led him home, murmuring sad ditties lovingly. As he stumbled in, he cursed his wife, a frail burden of middle age, singularly like himself, and then continued to murmur. The light of one candle and the beauty of the harp almost made beautiful the room in which we stood, while he sat with his instrument. The garish wall-paper was mildewed with lovely gleaming white fur, near the windows; elsewhere it was decorated by a large tradesman's photograph of Mr. Chamberlain, a copy of "The Maiden's Prayer," and the usual framed mourning verses on relatives; there was, too, a plush mandoline, and in the hearth a frond of the royal fern, and over it photographs of two generations of big consumptive men. THUNDERY WEATHER, NEAR DOLGELLY For a time the harper hesitated between the English tunes which were most in favour at "The Prince of Wales" and the songs for which the harp was made, when it was made for a bard who could string a harp, make a song for it, and accompany himself on the strings. We praised the Welsh airs, and though he seemed to ignore us, he played nothing else. We saw only his eyes, his white flickering fingers, and the harp, and as the triumphant, despairing, adoring melodies swept over it, this foolish casket of a man seemed to gather up all that could live of the lovers and warriors of a thousand years. No epitaph could be so eloquent of transient mortality. He had but to cloud or brighten those cruel, sentimental eyes, and to whisper to the dead instrument, to utter all that they had ever uttered. To this heir had come the riches of many hearts and he squandered them in a taproom for beer, and here for our amusement, as if they had been no better than gold and he a spendthrift. When sometimes he paused and silence came, or only the bark of a pump was heard, we seemed to have been assisting at the death and the last carouse of the souls for whom the music spoke. They lived only in his fingers and the harp, and with these they must die. They were as fleeting as pale butterflies in storm or as the Indian moonflower that blossoms only after sunset in May. Yet again and again the fingers and the harp consented to their life, and reassured, and half-believing that, because he had so much in trust, he could not die, we sat down and fell asleep, and waking again, were not surprised to find, as the July dawn approached, that the harper was harping still. For in that holy light that twittered among the strings, he was an immortal harper, doomed for ever to go on, because there was so much to be done, and because, as the landlord had said, he was the last of his race. III I went on, and was over the edge of this country, "built to music and so not built at all," when the sun began to rise behind me. Before, a range of hills stood up against the cold sky with bold lines such as a happy child will draw who has much paper and a stout crayon, and looked so that I remembered the proverb which says, that if a man goes up Cader Idris at night, by dawn he is dead, or mad, or a poet. They were immense; they filled half the sky; yet in the soft light that felt its way glimmeringly, and as if fearfully, among their vast valleys and along their high crags, they looked like ruins of something far more mighty; the fields also, on this side of them, and all the alder-loving streams and massy woods, were but as the embers of something which the night had made and had only half destroyed before its flight. And it was with surprise that, as I took my eyes off the prospect and looked down and in the hedge, I saw that I was in a place where lotus and agrimony and vetch were yellow, and the wild rose continued as ever to hesitate between red and white. It was not long possible to turn my back upon the rising sun, and when I looked round, I saw that the country I had left had been taken into the service of the dawn and was beautiful two miles away. Factory and chimney and street were bent in a rude circle round the sun, and were as the audience of some story-teller, telling a new tale—silent, solemn, and motionless, round a fire; and over them the blue clouds also were silent, solemn, and motionless, listening to the same tale, round the sun. When I went on towards the hills, they by that time looked as if they had never known the night; and sweet it was to pass, now and then, a thatched, embowered cottage, with windows open to the scented air, and to envy the sleepers within, while I could see and recognise the things—the sky and earth and air, the skylarks singing among the fading stars, and the last cuckoo calling in the silent, vast and lonely summer land—which make dreamless sleep amidst them so divine, I had long not known why. For half the day there was nothing to remember but sudden long views that led, happily, nowhere, among the clouds or the hills, and farms with sweetly smiling women, and jutting out of every hedge-bank a little pistyll of fair water, curving and shining in the heat, over a slice of stone or through a pipe, into the road. These things the memory has to work to remember. For, in truth, the day was but as a melody heard and liked. A child who, in the Welsh story, went to the land of the fairies, could only say that he had been listening to sweet airs, when he returned after a long stay. But at length, when I was among the hills, the ferns whispered all along the stony hedges, and on a cold stream of wind came the scent of invisible hay, and a great drop of rain shook all the bells on a foxglove stalk, and the straight, busy rain came down, and the hills talked with the heavens while it thundered heavily. The doves and jays only left the hedge as I passed within reach of them. The crouching partridge did not stir even after her eye caught mine. The lightning was as a tree of fire growing on the northern sky. The valley below was a deep and tranquil mere, in which I saw a church and trees and fields, as if they were reflections of things in the sky, and, like reflections in water, they were reverend in their beauty. The rain in my face washed off more than the weariness of a long day's walk, and I rejoiced, and found it easy to catch a train six miles off, which had seemed impossible. IV On the next day I was near the lake, Llyn-y-Fan Fach, and high up among hills, which had in many places outgrown their grassy garments, and showed bare cliffs, senates of great boulders, and streams of sliding fragments of stone like burnt paper. The delicate mountain sheep were panting in the heat, or following the shifting oasis of a shadow that sometimes moved across the hill; a horse stood nervously still, envying the shadow which he cast upon the ground. The world, for hours, was a hot, long road, with myself at one end and the lake at the other, when gradually I descended into a gentle land again. Far off, church bells were celebrating the peace and beauty of the morning as I turned into a lane of which more than twenty yards were seldom visible at one time; and I lost sight of everything else. Tall hedgerow elms and orchard trees held blue fragments of the sky among their leaves and hid the rest. Here and there was a cottage among the trees, and it seemed less the work of human hands than the cordon and espalier trees, apple and pear, and the fan-shaped cherry on the wall, with glowing bark. July, which had made the purple plum and the crimson bryony berry, had made it also, I thought. The lane was perhaps long enough to occupy an hour of the most slow-paced tranquil human life. Even if you talked with every ancient man that leaned on his spade, and listened to every young linnet that was learning to sing in the hazels, you could not spend more than two hours in passing along it. Yet, more than once, as I was pausing to count the white clusters of nuts or to remind myself that here was the first pale-blue flower of succory, I knew that I took up eternity with both hands, and though I laid it down again, the lane was a most potent, magic thing, when I could thus make time as nothing while I meandered over many centuries, consulting many memories that are as amulets. And even as I walked, the whole of time was but a quiet, sculptured corridor, without a voice, except when the tall grasses bowed and powdered the nettles with seed at my feet. For the time I could not admit the existence of strident or unhappy or unfortunate things. I exulted in the knowledge of how cheaply purchased are these pleasures, exulted and was yet humiliated to think how rare and lonely they are, nevertheless. The wave on which one is lifted clear of the foam and sound of things will never build itself again. And yet, at the lane's end, as I looked back at the long clear bramble curves, I will confess that there was a joy (though it put forth its hands to an unseen grief) in knowing that down that very lane I could never go again, and was thankful that it did not come rashly and suddenly upon the white highroad, and that there is no such thing known to the spirit as a beginning and an end. For not without cool shadow and fragrance was the white highroad. Then, after some miles up a hot and silent hill, I came to the lake under the chin of a high summit, and it was cool.... At the end of the twelfth century, when Owen Gwynedd in the north and Lord Rhys in the south made little of English kings, a farmer's widow lived with one son at Blaensawdde, near the lake. She sent her cattle on to the Black Mountain under the care of her son. And the cattle liked Llyn-y-Fan because the great stones on its shore gave them shade, and because the golden stony shallows were safe and sweet, and no water was finer than that in the little quiet wells of the Sawdde brook. Watching his cattle there one day, the youth saw a lovely girl, with long, yellow hair and pale, melancholy face, seated on the surface of the lake and looking down into the mirror of the water, for she was combing her hair. Some say that she was rowing with golden sculls up and down the lake in a golden boat, so ample was her hair. The young man was moved by her loveliness to hold out to her his own barley-bread and cheese, which was all that he had with him. And she came near, but she would not accept the food; when he tried to touch her, she slid away, saying— and so disappeared, as a lily when the waves are rising. The youth told his adventure to his mother, who advised him to take unbaked dough for the girl, instead of his crisp barley bread. The next morning he was at the lake before dawn, and saw cold ripples on the water and a cloud on the highest of the hills. But as the light overcame the cloud and began to warm the ripples, he saw some of his cattle in danger on the steep side of the lake, where the rains run almost perpendicularly down to the margin and cut weals of naked red earth in the mountain-side. And as he was running round to the cattle, he saw the girl upon the water, and again held out his hand to offer his unbaked dough. Again she refused, and said: "O thou of the moist bread, I will not have thee." Then, with smiles, she disappeared. The youth told his second adventure to his mother, and she advised him to take slightly baked bread. The Welsh have a proverb: "Better is cookery than kingship"; and she being skilled with the oven, baked him the bread. The next morning he was again at the lake. The cold ripples turned to gold and then to silver, and the cloud left the mountain; and he saw the wind making grey O's and V's on the water, until it was almost evening, and behind him the oak trees in the Sawdde valley gleamed where his homeward way would be, when he saw several cows walking on the water, and then the girl moving towards him. He ran forward into the water; he held out the bread, and she took it, and promised to marry him on the condition that he should not give her three causeless blows; if he did, she would disappear. Suddenly she left him, and he would have cast himself in with despair, if she had not returned with another as beautiful and in the same way, together with a majestic, tall, and hoary man, who promised to bestow the girl upon him if he could distinguish her. So the two girls stood before him; and the youth, casting down his eyes in thought and perplexity, saw one thrust her little foot forward, and he noticed how her sandals were tied, because he had before studied the beauty of her ankles and feet; and he chose rightly. The old man promised that they should have as many cattle, horses, sheep, and goats as she could count of each without drawing breath. The girl counted quickly, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on, and all the beasts came up from the lake; and the young man went with the girl and married her, and lived at Esgair Llaethdy beyond Blaensawdde, and there she bore him three sons. But one day, when they were to go together to a christening, she was reluctant, saying that it was too far to walk; and he bade her take a horse. She asked for her gloves, and when he returned with them, he found her still delaying, and flicked her shoulder with one and said pettingly, "Go, go." And she reminded him that he had given her a causeless blow. On another day, at a wedding, she gave way to tears, and he tapped her shoulder to admonish her. And she reminded him that he had given her two causeless blows. Many years later, at a funeral, she laughed, and again he tapped her shoulder. And she turned, and called her cattle and horses and sheep and goats by name—the brindled cow, the white speckled, the mottled, the white-faced cows; "And the grey Geingen With the white bull From the court of the king; And the little black calf Though suspended on the hook, Come thou also quite well home"; and the four grey oxen ploughing in the fields. They followed her to the lake, and behind them grew the furrow made by the plough which the four oxen still drew, and they all entered the lake. Her sons desired to see her, and she appeared again to her son Rhiwallon, and told him that he was to be a healer of men, and gave him prescriptions, and promised that if he needed her, she would come again. So she often met them near the lake, and once walked with them towards Myddfai, as far as Pant-y-Meddygon, where she showed them herbs and their virtues. And they became famous, and good physicians. They were physicians to Rhys Gryg of South Wales; and the last of their descendants who practised at Myddfai was buried in 1739 at Myddfai church. August I On a fine, very hot day I had to wait three hours for a train, and should have left the bald junction for that time, if I had not seen there a poet of my acquaintance, contentedly reading Spenser on the central platform. I sat down with him, but he preferred reading to talking, and I looked over his shoulder to read: Begin then, O my dearest sacred Dame! Daughter of Phoebus and of Memorye.... And I could not sufficiently admire his fortitude, until, on the arrival of a train, he left the book on the seat, and walked down alongside the train. It stopped ten minutes, and he talked with persons in three different carriages before it left. He came back unperturbed, and told me briefly that —— from Patagonia was in the train, with —— the bard from North Wales, and a friend from London. Seeing me surprised, he explained that every Saturday in the summer he spent entirely on the platform, waiting for surprises of this kind. Four trains stopped there before I left, and each seemed to be laden with friends and acquaintances,—some who lived in distant parts and even overseas, and some whom he had not seen for years. And some of the persons whom he greeted he had never seen before, which was a good reason for greeting them; he had perhaps heard of them, or they of him; and so they talked. The liking of Welshmen for Welshmen is very strong, and that not only when they meet on foreign soil, as in London, but in their own land. They do not, I suppose, love their neighbours more than other men do, but when they meet a fellow-countryman for the first time they seem to have a kind of surprise and joy, in spite of the commonness of such meetings. They do not acquiesce in the fact that the man they shake hands with is of their race, as English people do. They converse readily in trains: they are all of one family, and indeed if you are Welsh, not only can you not avoid meeting relatives, but you do not wish to. Small news about the coming and going of people travels among them rapidly, and I have never got out of a train in Wales without feeling that I shall meet some one whom I should like to meet, on the platform or in the first street. They like their own land in the same way. I do not easily believe in patriotism, in times of peace or war, except as a party cry, or the result of intoxication or an article in a newspaper, unless I am in Wales. I did not know before that any save sellers of newspapers were happy in railway stations, and as my train went out, I passed the poet at his Spenser again and recalled the poem called "Howell's Delight," which was written by a young, unfortunate prince of North Wales in the twelfth century:— A white foam-crowned wave flows o'er the grave Of Rhuvawn Bevyr, chief of Rulers. I this day hate England, a flat and inactive land, With a people involved in every wile; I love the land where I had the much-desired gift of mead, Where the shores extend in tedious conflict; I love the society and the numerous inhabitants Therein, who, obedient to their Lord, Direct their views of peace; I love its sea-coast and its mountains, Its cities bordering on its forests, its fair landscapes, Its dales, its waters, and its vales, Its white seamews, and its beauteous women; I love its warriors, and its well-trained steeds, Its woods, its strongholds, and its social domicile; I love its fields clothed with tender trefoil, Where I had the glory of a lasting triumph; I love its cultivated regions, the prerogative of heroism, Its far extended wilds, and its sports of the chase, Which, Son of God! are great and wonderful. How sleek the majestic deer, and in what plenty found; I achieved with a push of a spear the task of honour Between the Chief of Powys and fair Gwynedd; And if I am pale in the rush of conflict, 'Tis that I know I shall be compelled to leave my country, For it is certain that I cannot hold out till my party comes, A dream has revealed it, and God says 'tis true. A white foam-crowned wave flows o'er the grave, A white bright-foaming wave boldly raves against the towns, Tinted the time it swells like glittering hoar. I love the marches of Marioneth, Where my head was pillowed on a snow-white arm; I love the nightingale on the privet wood In the famous vale of Cymmer Deuddwfr, Lord of heaven and earth, the glory of Gwyneddians. Though it is so far from Keri to Caerliwelydd, I mounted the yellow steed, and from Maelienydd Reached the land of Reged between night and day. Before I am in the grave, may I enjoy a new blessing From the land of Tegyngyl of fairest aspect! II The flowers by the road, wood-betony, sage, mallow, ragwort ... were dry; the larches, that were fitted to the hillside like scales or breast feathers, were dry; but a mountain stream, which many stones tore to ribbons, was with me for miles, and to the left and to the right many paths over the hills ran with alluring courses for half a mile, like happy thoughts or lively fancies, and ended suddenly. The mountains increased in height as the sun sank, and their sides began to give a home to enormous, still shadows and to rich, inaccessible groves among the clefts. And in the end of the afternoon I came to a village I knew, which grew round an irregular lawn. From the inn, I could see the whole village. The limes before me were full of light; the green grass beyond was tending to be grey. There were not far fewer people than usual in the neighbourhood, yet the calm was great. It seemed to have something to announce and to call solemnly for silence; the voice of a child crying, a man with shining cuffs, was an extraordinary impertinence. SUNNY AFTERNOON, CARDIGAN BAY But two reclining cows were calm enough, and in the middle distance an oak was stately enough. A tramp, his wife, and five children spoke with quiet, husky voices that were sad enough. A passage from Hyperion which I recalled was noble enough. Six bells that rang three miles off and some white downs of cloud on the horizon were in harmony. It was a time when the whole universe strove to speak a universal speech, the speech of the stars in their courses, of the flower that is beautiful, of the soul that aspires, of the mind that thinks. But, as it seemed, owing to my fault, the effort was unsuccessful, and I rose hurriedly and left the village behind. III And while the hedgerows on one side of the road were in places rich with the heavy, horizontal sunshine that came through gateways on the other side, I saw the star-like shining of the windows of an old house on a hill. A difficult winding lane led up to it, and so long was the lane that between the road and the house a badger and a raven had their homes. When I came near the house one pallid angle of it glowed, and only where it glowed was it visible. The house was perhaps two hundred years old—stately, grey as the old blackthorns in the hedge, and it was, perhaps because I knew of the fading race that had lived within it, the oldest thing among those old hills. It was more unchangeable than the most grim crag on the hills which had its milkwhite harebell on that day. It was a survival from winter, from hundreds of winters, and therefore, though young in years, it spoke a language which time, knowing that the unchangeable is dead, had forgotten: A spirit calling in an old old tongue Forgotten in lost graves in lonesome places; A spirit huddled in an old old heart Like a blind crone crouched o'er a long-dead fire.... Nothing ever happened among the Powells at ——. The lawn was mowed; the fern from the hill was carted down; the little red apples ripened; the Powell hair turned from gold to grey. A stranger, indeed, heard much of them, but when he asked where they lived, he was told that there were thirty of them in the church and one at —— on the hill. Five generations of them had lived there, since the only conspicuous one of the family had died in the first war with Napoleon. Of those five, the last could only say that theirs had been the most desperate of quests, for they knew not what they sought. They had lived in dignity and simplicity, neither sporting nor cultured, yet loving foxhounds and books. Generation after generation of the children had learned "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" from their fathers, and with all their happiness in that dim house, they learned to love "Il Penseroso" best.... A SUDDEN SQUALL, CARDIGAN BAY September In the afternoon I climbed out of a valley, descended again, and came on to a road that rolled over many little hills into many little valleys, and at the top of each hill grew the vision of a purple land ahead. But, for some miles, the valleys were solitary. There were brooks in them with cold, fresh voices, and copses of oak, and sometimes the smoke or the white wall of a house. There sang the latest of the willow-wrens, and among the blackthorns a bullfinch, with delicate voices. The air was warm and motionless; the light on oak and grass was steady and rich; the sky was low and leaning gently to the earth, and its large white clouds moved not, though they changed their shapes. But these things belonged to the brooks, the copses, the willow-wrens; or so it seemed, since that warm day, which elsewhere might have seemed so kind with an ancient kindness as if to one returning home after long exile, was not kind, but was indifferent and made an intruder of me. And I should have passed the stony hedges and the little brooks over the road and the desolate mine, in the indifferent little worlds of the valleys, one by one, as if they had been in a museum, or as if I had been taken there to admire them, had it not been that on the crests of the road between valley and valley, I saw the purple beckoning hills far away, and that, at length, towards the last act of the dim, rich, long-drawn out and windless sunset, the road took me into a small valley that was different. Just within reach of the sunset light, on one side of the valley lay a farm, with ricks, outhouses, and two cottages, all thatched. In the corner of the field nearest to the house, the long-horned craggy cattle were beginning to lie down. Those cattle, always vast and fierce, seemed to have sprung from the earth—into which the lines of their recumbent bodies flowed—out of which their horns rose coldly and angrily. The buildings also had sprung from the earth, and only prejudice taught me that they were homes of men. They enmeshed the shadows and lights of sunset in their thatch, and were as some enormous lichen-covered things, half crag, half animal, which the cattle watched, together with five oaks. There was not a sound, until a child ran to a pump, and sang a verse of some grave hymn lightheartedly, and filled a shining can with dark water, and disappeared. ST. DAVID'S—BISHOP'S PALACE Then I raised my eyes, so that they crept swiftly, though not without feeling the weariness of the distance, over hill after hill to the one upon which the last, mild, enormous, purple dragon of the sunset was pasturing; yet I saw nothing in earth or sky which did not belong to those things, half crag, half animal, in the small valley, in happiness and peace that consented to the voice of the child. Then I passed the farm and saw a crimson fire casting innumerable arms about a room; I heard the rattle and click of the pump; and I knew that it was cold, that I had far to go, and that the desolation beyond the farm was illimitable. For such moods of the world are easily shut against us for some small thing, as the world of the little people was shut against the man in the tale which Gerald of Wales repeats:— A priest of Gower, named Elidorus, told Gerald that when he was a schoolboy he was often beaten by his master. So one day he ran away and hid himself in a hollow among the alder roots at the edge of a stream. There he was safe, but had no food. And on the third day two wonderfully little men came to him and said that if he would come with them, they would lead him to a happy and pleasant country. He therefore left his hiding-place and went with the little men through a country of wood and field and water that was beautiful, although they saw neither sun nor moon. At last they came to the court of the king, and Elidorus was presented to him; and, after looking at him carefully, the king gave him over to his young son. And the people of that country, though they were wonderfully little, were beautiful in shape and of a fair complexion, and they wore long hair that fell over their shoulders in the manner of women. Their horses and hounds were of a suitable size. The little people ate neither flesh nor fish, but lived on milk, which they concocted with saffron. They never took an oath; they always spoke the truth. Nor had they any kind of public worship, but simply kept and loved good faith. And their language was very much like Greek, as he afterwards said. The little people often went up into our world, and never returned without speaking harshly of men for their ambition and want of faith and constancy. Sometimes Elidorus went up with them. Sometimes he went up alone, but revealed himself to his mother only, telling her of his life and of the little people and their country. When he told her that gold abounded there, she asked him to bring her some golden thing as a gift. So he stole a golden ball from the son of the king and ran to his mother with it. But the little people pursued him, and in his haste he stumbled over the threshold of his mother's door and fell. He lost hold of the ball, and the little people picked it up and went away, laughing at him and taunting him. And when he rose up, he was ashamed and angry because he had stolen the ball. Then he would have gone back to the country of the little people, but, although he searched for a year, he could never discover the true path. In course of time he gave up the search and the hope of returning. He even went back to school and became a priest. But long afterwards, when he was an old man, he could never speak of his strange truancy without tears. October I The rain and the wind had ceased, and in the garden the Painted Lady butterflies were tremulously enjoying the blue Michaelmas daisies, and an old man was gathering seeds of hollyhock, evening primrose, and foxglove, and putting them into white cups on the garden paths. In the hedges the bryony coils were crimson and green among thorn and hazel; the sparrows were thick in the elms, whose branches had snatched straws from passing waggons; one bare ash tree was all in bud with singing linnets. Over all was a blue sky, with throbbing clouds of rooks; and beyond all, over leagues of rocky pastures and grim oaks, the mountains,—and upon one of them a white flower of cloud or snow, above which presently rose many clouds, and in the midst of them a narrow pane of sky full of misty golden light, and behind that a land where Troy is still defended,—where still Camilla, loving war and maidenhood eternally, bounds over the unbending corn,—and where, in the hall of a castle, four-and-twenty damsels are embroidering satin, and the least lovely of them is lovelier than Gwenhwyvar, the wife of Arthur, "when she has appeared loveliest at the Offering, or on the day of the Nativity, or at the feast of Easter." II The last village was far behind. The last happy chapel-goer had passed me long ago. A cock crowed once and said the last word on repose. The rain fell gently; the stems of the hazels in the thickets gleamed; and the acorns in the grassy roads, and under the groups of oaks, showed all their colours, and especially the rosy hues where they had but just before been covered by the cup. One by one I saw the things which make the autumn hedges so glorious and strange at a little distance: the yellow ash trees, with some green leaves; the hoary and yellow willows; the hawthorns, purple and crimson and green; the briers, with most hips where there were fewest leaves; the green brambles with red fruit and black; tall, grey, and leafless thistles with a few small crimson flowers; the grey-green nettles with purple stems; the ragwort flowers; and on the long, green, wet grass the fallen leaves shining under red and yellow oaks; and through the olive lances of hazel the fields shining in patines of emerald. Doves cooed in the oaks, pheasants gleamed below. The air was full of the sweetness of the taste of blackberries, and the scent of mushrooms and of crumbling, wild carrot-seeds, and the colour of yellow, evening grass. The birches up on the hills above the road were golden, and like flowers. Between me and them a smouldering fire once or twice sent up dancing crimson flames, and the colour and perfume of the fire added themselves to the power of the calm, vast, and windless evening, of which the things I saw were as a few shells and anemones at the edge of a great sea. The valley waited and waited. Then by the roadside I saw a woman of past middle age sitting silently. Her small head was poised a little haughtily on a blithe neck; her fine, grey, careful hair spared gloomy white forehead and round ears, which shone; her full, closed lips spoke clearly of both the sadness of to-day and the voluptuousness of yesterday. She was beautiful, and not merely because she had once been a beautiful girl. She had become mortal through grief, and though I could not see her crown, yet crowned she was. Will you always, O sad and tranquil Demeter, sit by the wayside and expect Persephone? III It was the last day of the month, and in a gently heaving land, which was broken every three or four miles by a sudden, castled crag, Autumn was perfect, but with just a touch of sublimity added to its beauty by the thought that, on the next day or the next, winter would fall upon her unsuspected, as Pizarro and the Spanish cavalry fell upon that noble Indian, Atahualpa, who had come up to them in peace and meekness and pomp, upon a golden litter, among thousands of his gentle subjects, making music and decorated with gold, and expecting to meet the gods. ST. CATHERINE'S ROCK, TENBY The bells of the cattle on broad, yellow lawns were ringing. Squirrels glowed in the road; the heavy rooks let fall the acorns among the leaves continually. The last beams of the sun reached now a circle of high bracken on a far-off hill, and reached it alone and transfigured it with strong, quiet light; and then made one brown hill seem to be consumed in a golden glow, while the next hill was sombre; and again devoted themselves to a group of beeches that shone ruddy, branch and leaf and bole, and divine and majestic and unrelated to the cattle passing underneath. The sun went down; wild-duck and moorhen cried and scudded on the calm, winding, silver river at my feet; and in a field beyond, that retained so much liquid and lugubrious light as to seem a green water, some laughing boys in white and yellow played football, without regarding the silver and purple, frosty sky, to which, nevertheless, their shrill voices added something, from which their movements took something, that was glorious and pathetic. And near by, dark oxen with rocking gait thrust their horns up into the sky as they approached the bridge. OLD ROMAN BRIDGE, NEAR SWANSEA November The night had almost come, and the rain had not ceased, among the hills of an unknown country. Behind me, twelve desolate miles of hill and sky away, was a village; and on the way to it, half-a-dozen farms; and before me were three or four houses scattered over two or three miles of winding lanes, with an inn and a church. The parson had just come away from his poultry, and as his wife crossed the road with her apron over her head, I asked where the inn was, and whether it had a room ready in the winter. Two minutes after she had seen me—if she could see me in the dark lane—she had told me that if the inn had no room, I was not to go farther, but to stay at the vicarage. But the inn had a bed to spare, and there was good beer to be had by a great fire in a room shining with brass and pewter, and overhead guns and hams and hanks of wool; and the hostess was jocund, stout, and young, and not only talkative but anxious to be talked to, and she had that maternal kindness—or shall I call it the kindness of a very desirable aunt?—towards strangers, which I have always found in Welsh women, young and old, in the villages and on the moors. So there I stayed and listened to the rain and the fire and the landlady's rich, humming voice uttering and playing strange tricks with English. I was given a change of clothing as if I had asked and paid for it. Then I went to the vicarage, and because I said I loved Welsh hymns and Welsh voices, the vicar and his wife and daughter, without unction or preparation or a piano, sang to me, taking parts, some tremendous hymns and some gay melodies, Whence banished is the roughness of our years, which made the rain outside seem April rain. They sang, and told me about the road I was to follow, until I had to go to my inn. Next day, after paying what I liked at the inn, and promising the hostess that I would learn Welsh, I walked for twenty miles over stony roads gleaming with rain upon the white thorns and bloom on the sloes, and through woods where nothing brooded solemnly over grey moss and green moss on the untrodden, rotten wood, and up dry, ladder-like beds of brooks that served as paths, over peat and brindled grass, and along golden hazel hedges, where grew the last meadow-sweet with herb-robert and harebell and one wild rose, and above little valleys of lichened ash trees; and sometimes beneath me, and sometimes high above, the yellow birches waved in the rain, like sunset clouds fettered to the ground and striving and caracoling in their fetters. Again I came at nightfall to a strange farmhouse, and was honoured by being asked into the kitchen; again I was given dry clothes. The juicy mutton broke up like game. The farmer sang to me from the Welsh hymn-book and from a collection of old Welsh songs, in a room which was none the worse for a portrait of Miss Maud Millett, "The Soldier's Farewell," and the presence of a fierce-thoughted, mild-eyed young minister, who was the most majestic man I have seen since I first saw the shop-walkers at Maple's—the kind of man whom one supposes that the animals observe, and so learn to temper their contempt for us. This man had the strange whim to call the devil a gentleman, a poor distinction which I could not understand until he showed me a passage, that should be highly interesting to gentlemen and the residue of mankind, in one of the Iolo MSS. Beginning at the beginning, the MS. declares that Adam's eldest son was ungenteel, "a low vassal"; but Seth and Abel were genteel. The angels also, the tenth grade, who fell from heaven, were ungenteel, "through pride, which is the principal characteristic of weakness." Continuing, the writer says of Noah's sons that one was a lord, the second a gentleman, the third a servile clown. Either the usual order of the sons is changed, or Ham was held to be a gentleman because from him was descended Nimrod, and all destroyers are gentlemen. If this be true, then Japheth was a "servile clown,"—in spite of the fact that he was "the first who made a targe with a lake in it, to signify that he and his brothers possessed the whole world," inventing heraldry,—merely in order that ungentility might have a common fount. And thus we see that descent is efficacious to all except descendants of Japheth (or Ham), and that therefore the genealogies are waste paper, and a popular pursuit which has hitherto been regarded as harmless is proved to be also fraudulent.... Then he went back to his books, which he allowed me to see. They were pretty, uncut editions of the profane classics; theology, Welsh history, and Grimm's Fairy Tales—all thumbed and pencilled. Frowning above was a photograph of Spurgeon, and a picture of Whitman from a chance number of an English weekly. When I left on the next morning early, the farmer was threshing with an oaken flail in his barn; but he stepped out to tell me what he knew of the way through the bogs and over the hills,—for there was no road or path,—and to beg me not to go, and to ask me to pay what I had paid at my former inn, for my lodging. VIEW NEAR MUMBLES, SWANSEA The next twenty miles were the simplest and most pleasant in the world. For nearly the whole way there was a farm in every two miles. I had to call at each to ask my way. At one, the farmer asked me in and sat me by his peat fire to get dry, and gave me good milk and butter and bread, and a sack for my shoulders, and a sense of perfect peace which was only disturbed when he found that I could not help him in the verses he was writing for a coming wedding. At another, the farmer wrote out a full list of the farms and landmarks on my way, lest I should forget, and gave me bread and butter and milk. At another, I had but to sit and get dry and watch an immeasurably ancient, still, and stately woman, her face bound with black silk which came under her chin like a stock, and moving only to give a smile of welcome and goodwill. At another, they added cheese to the usual meal, and made the peat one golden cone upon the hearth, and brewed a pale drink which is called tea. Sometimes the shrill-voiced women, with no English, their hair flying in the wind, came out and shrieked and waved directions. In one of the houses I was privileged to go from the kitchen, with its dresser and innumerable jugs and four tea-services, to the drawing-room. It was a change that is probably more emphasised in Wales than elsewhere, since the kitchens are pleasanter, the drawing-rooms more mysterious, than in England, I think. The room was cold, setting aside the temperature, and in spite of crimson in the upholstery and cowslip yellow in the wall-paper and dreary green on the floor. There was a stuffed heron; a large pathetic photograph of man and wife; framed verses; some antimacassars, and some Bibles.... The room was dedicated to the unknown God. The farmer did not understand it; he admired it completely, and with awe, reverencing it as a priest his god, knowing that it never did him any good, and yet not knowing what evil might come if he were without it. At last, as I left landmarks behind in the rain, I reached a poor little house where a family of sixteen sat round the peat or went about their work, all preserving that easy dignity when their poverty is under the eyes of a stranger which I have ever found among the Welsh. Of his own accord, the farmer came with me over the worst part of my way—two apparently trackless miles—until I came to a road at last. He spoke no English; and yet I had, and think he had, a wonderful sense of satisfaction in our companionship of an hour, as he led me over undulating, boggy lands intersected by rivers,—which looked a little way off like an unpeopled continent in miniature, with lake and hill and stream,—and along the edges of steep crags that rose sheer from black brooks and grey foam, and above hollows inhabited by perfect, golden birches. It was a land which always comes back to me when the same cold rain, on the top of a London omnibus, beats the face and blurs the hurrying crowd and makes the ears tingle. Once, the rain stopped, and the air was calm, as we passed among decaying oaks, which were as a church full of men when the organ begins, and we no better than any one of them.... He accepted money with as little offence as the others had given when they refused it. As a rule, I would rather drop a sovereign by the road than offer a man sixpence who has nothing of the lackey about him, though imitativeness has compelled me to do otherwise. PENNARD CASTLE, GLAMORGANSHIRE As he left me, a mist which he had probably foreseen suddenly cloaked me and hid everything except the road and its green edges, where the gentlest of winds shook the rain on the feathered grasses, but could not make it fall. The road was a river, shallow but swift, and for four miles there was not a house visible, except when the mist divided for a minute and showed, far away, a fair, shining, unshadowed valley, and a white house and motionless sheep, which I saw as a departed spirit might for a moment behold the earth; for the world was gone like last year's clouds. Yet again, the mist rose a little and showed lawns with a lovely dim light over the grass, as if the lawns had a light of their own which also made them seem aloof. And strangely sufficient was the mist, the hard road, and the moist stick in my hand, when my mood changed as when at night bells clash as if they were building the cathedral again with their noise, and we watch its pinnacles thus made among the stars, and joyously they clash so that we believe they will never cease; and suddenly they cease and slowly toll. For the inn glimmered close by, and I heard the rustle of many sheep, and my brain began to prepare itself for meeting men again. December Twenty miles from the sea, a little river leaves an underground lake, flows through a cave, and falls radiant from the darkness among steep rocks, and takes a course like a man's thoughts when they have the joy of an unknown impulse and no certain aim. There, the river always talks of Spring. It winds and studies all the country round,—castle and farm and inn and old graves,—with many sharp digressions, which I suppose it could not have done without, any more than I in a similar case. Now it shines and curves gently and looks over its bank at the cattle, and now, changing its voice, it is gloomy and intent among mossy stones, and now it leaps and is all foam over a ladder of crag. Suddenly it enters a steep, wooded valley, and falling over a perpendicular cliff, it is richly embowered, and always remembers Summer, and begins to please the trout where it swirls with shuddering foam or runs swiftly in the middle, and gloomily and slow under the alder roots. But in the wood, where birch and oak and hornbeam stand over it, it gains a look of great and growing age which mountain rivers have, and a shadow besets its cheerfulness, so unlike the happy prime of English waters among cowslip meadows. When it leaves the wood it is a masterly, full-grown stream that can turn a mill-wheel. Then it begins to pause in deep pools under shadowy bridges, where the otter slides for a moment over a slippery ledge and then can hide his path for fifty yards. There the girls stand and dip their vessels, and think for a minute while the vessels fill, and raise them again, spilling some, and show that the black water can shine as when it left the mountain ten miles away. Leaving a hamlet near one bridge, the river runs through such a lonely land that even on stormy nights it is heard only by the groups and groves of oaks that guard the stony and tussocky pastures. Here and there, on either hand, a brook adds a murmur to its music. A throbbing flock of lapwings for ever wheels and gleams and calls over it. The royal fern basks on its edge. And there Autumn abides. When it reaches the next village, the river is so yellow and poisonous that only in great floods dare the salmon come up. There, with two other rivers, it makes a noble estuary, and at the head of that estuary and in the village that commands it, the old and the new seem to be at strife. On the one hand are the magnificent furnaces; the black, wet roads; the ugly houses, that have the one pleasing virtue of not pretending to be anything else, with their naÏvely chosen names, such as "Bryn Gwyn Bach" and Mazawattee Villa; the cheap and pretentious chapels; yet all of them filled with people bearing the old names,—the women called Olwen, Myfanwy, Angharad,—loving the old songs, theologies, histories. I heard of one man there who once heard part of Robinson Crusoe told on a winter night. For a year he struggled and learned to read, and found no version in Welsh. Then he went to London, and while he helped to sell milk, learned to read English, and came back home with a copy of the desirable book. On the other hand, there is the great water, bent as if it were a white arm of the sea, thrust into the land to preserve the influence of the sea. Close to the village stands a wooded barrow and an ancient camp; and there are long, flat marches where sea-gulls waver and mew; and a cluster of oaks so wind-worn that when a west wind comes it seems to come from them as they wave their haggish arms; and a little desolate white church and white-walled graveyard, which on December evenings will shine and seem to be the only things at one with the foamy water and the dim sky, before the storm; and when the storm comes the church is gathered up into its breast and is a part of it, so that he who walks in the churchyard is certain that the gods—the gods that grow old and feeble and die—are there still, and with them all those phantoms following phantoms in a phantom land,—a gleam of spears, a murmur of arrows, a shout of victory, a fair face, a scream of torture, a song, the form of some conqueror and pursuer of English kings,—which make Welsh history, so that to read it is like walking in that place among December leaves that seem never to have lived and been emerald, and looking at the oaks in the mist, which are only hollows in the mist, while an ancient wind is ceaselessly remembering ancient things.
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