Chapter V: Wales Month by Month (2)

"'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.

"'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.

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.

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—

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.

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:

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.

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.

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—

"O thou of the crimped bread,
'Tis not easy to catch me";

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 Phœbus 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.

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....

_September_