BEAUTIFUL WALES
AGENTS IN AMERICA
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
[Illustration: THE STACK, HOLYHEAD]
BEAUTIFUL WALES
PAINTED BY ROBERT
FOWLER · R·I · DESCRIBED
BY EDWARD THOMAS
WITH A NOTE ON MR.
FOWLER'S LANDSCAPES
BY ALEX. J. FINBERG
PUBLISHED BY A. & C.
BLACK · LONDON · MCMV
[Illustration]
PREFACE
A few of my jests, impressions of scenery, and portraits in this book
have already been printed in _The Daily Chronicle_, _The World_, _The
Week's Survey_, _The Outlook_, and _The Illustrated London News_. I have
only to add that the line of verse on p. 34 is by Mr. Ernest Rhys; the
lines on p. 71 are by Mr. T. Sturge Moore; and those on pp. 130 and 178
by Mr. Gordon Bottomley: and to confess, chiefly for the benefit of the
solemn reviewer, that I know nothing of the Welsh language.
EDWARD THOMAS.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON MEN, AUTHORS, AND THINGS IN WALES 1
CHAPTER II
ENTERING WALES 28
CHAPTER III
A FARMHOUSE UNDER A MOUNTAIN, A FIRE, AND SOME FIRESIDERS 41
CHAPTER IV
TWO MINISTERS, A BARD, A SCHOOLMASTER, AN INNKEEPER, AND OTHERS 55
CHAPTER V
WALES MONTH BY MONTH 99
APPENDIX
A NOTE ON MR. FOWLER'S LANDSCAPES, BY ALEXANDER J. FINBERG 201
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. The Stack, Holyhead _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. Summer Evening, Anglesey Coast 2
3. Yachts, Anglesey Coast 4
4. Beaumaris—Moonlight 6
5. The Beach, Beaumaris 8
6. The Trout Stream 12
7. Near Menai Straits 14
8. Near Bangor 18
9. A Footpath on the Great Orme 20
10. A View from the Great Orme's Head 24
11. Old Cottage and Ruins of Abbey, Great Orme's Head 26
12. Breezy Morning, Llandudno Bay 28
13. Country Lane 30
14. A Nocturne, Llandudno Bay 32
15. Conway from Benarth—Early Morning 36
16. Near Colwyn Bay 38
17. Distant View of Penmaenmawr—Early Morning Light 42
18. Silvery Light, Conway Shore 44
19. A Mountain Pass—Noon 48
20. Conway Castle and Quay—Noon 50
21. Conway Valley 54
22. Carnarvon, from Anglesey 56
23. Boddnant Hall, Conway Valley 60
24. Carnarvon Castle 62
25. Distant View of Carnarvon Bay 66
26. On the River Seiont, Carnarvonshire—Evening Glow 68
27. Bridge, Cwm-y-Glo—Evening 72
28. Field Path, near Llanrug 74
29. Windy Day, near Llanrug 78
30. Morning Mists, near Trefriw 80
31. Distant View of Bettws-y-Coed 82
32. The Old Bridge, Bettws-y-Coed 84
33. Swallow Falls, Bettws-y-Coed 86
34. Fairy Glen, Bettws-y-Coed 90
35. Church Pool, Bettws-y-Coed 92
36. Miner's Bridge on River Llugwy 96
37. Sunny Field, near Llanberis 100
38. Welsh Farm, near Llanberis 104
39. Snowdon from Cwm-y-Glo 106
40. Snowdon from Llanberis Lake 108
41. Snowdon from Traeth Mawr 110
42. Snowdon from Capel Curig Lake—Summer Evening 114
43. In the Lledr Valley 116
44. Duffws Mountain 120
45. Duffws Mountain in Mist 122
46. Coming Night, near Beddgelert 126
47. Aberglaslyn 128
48. View of Moelwyn 132
49. A Hayfield near Portmadoc 134
50. Valle Crucis Abbey 136
51. View of Llangollen 138
52. A Lonely Shore near Penrhyn Deudraeth 140
53. The Shore near Harlech—Afternoon 142
54. In the Woods, Farchynys, Barmouth Estuary 146
55. Incoming Tide, near Barmouth 148
56. Barmouth Bridge 152
57. Misty Morning, near Barmouth 154
58. A Lonely Shore, Barmouth Estuary 156
59. View from Bontddu, Dolgelly 158
60. Thundery Weather, near Dolgelly 160
61. Near Penmaen Pool—Noon 162
62. View of Cader Idris 164
63. Mist on Cader Idris 168
64. In the Woods, Berwyn 170
65. Aberdovey 172
66. Sunny Afternoon, Cardigan Bay 176
67. A Sudden Squall, Cardigan Bay 178
68. St. David's—Bishop's Palace 180
69. The Stacks, near Tenby 182
70. St. Catherine's Rock, Tenby 186
71. Old Roman Bridge, near Swansea 188
72. View near Mumbles, Swansea 192
73. Pennard Castle, Glamorganshire 194
74. Old Castle Keep, Cardiff 198
_The Illustrations in this volume have been engraved and printed in
England
by Hentschel Colourtype, Ltd._
WALES
CHAPTER I
PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON MEN, AUTHORS, AND THINGS IN WALES
Among friends and acquaintances and authors, I have met many men who
have seen and read more of Wales than I can ever do. But I am somewhat
less fearful in writing about the country, inasmuch as few of them seem
to know the things which I know, and fewer still in the same way. When I
read their books or hear them speak, I am interested, pleased, amazed,
but seldom am I quite sure that we mean the same thing by Wales;
sometimes I am sure that we do not. One man writes of the country as the
home of legends, whose irresponsibility puzzles him, whose naïveté
shocks him. Another, and his name is legion, regards it as littered with
dead men's bones, among which a few shepherds and miners pick their way
without caring for the lover of bones. Another, of the same venerable
and numerous family as the last, has admired the silver lake of
Llanberis or blue Plynlimmon; has been pestered by the pronunciation of
Machynlleth, and has carried away a low opinion of the whole language
because his own attempts at uttering it are unmelodious and even
disgusting; has fallen entirely in love with the fragrant Welsh ham,
preferring it, in fact, to the curer and the cook. Others, who have not,
as a rule, gone the length of visiting the persons they condemn, call
the Welshmen thieving, lying, religious, and rebellious knaves. Others
would repeat with fervour the verse which Evan sings in Ben Jonson's
masque, _For the Honour of Wales_:
And once but taste o' the Welsh mutton,
Your English seep's not worth a button:
and so they would conclude, admitting that the trout are good when
caught. Some think, and are not afraid of saying, that Wales will be
quite a good place (in the season) when it has been chastened a little
by English enterprise: and I should not be surprised were they to begin
by introducing English sheep, though I hardly see what would be done
with them, should they be cut up and exposed for sale. The great
disadvantage of Wales seems to be that it is not England, and the only
solution is for the malcontents to divide their bodies, and, leaving one
part in their native land, to have the rest sent to Wales, as they used
to send Welsh princes to enjoy the air of two, three, and even four
English towns, at the same time and in an elevated position.
[Illustration: SUMMER EVENING, ANGLESEY COAST]
Then also there are the benevolent writers of books, who have for a
century repeated, sometimes not unmusically, the words of a fellow who
wrote in 1798, that the beauty of Llangollen "has been universally
allowed by gentlemen of distinguished taste," and that, in short, many
parts of Wales "have excited the applause of tourists and poets." Would
that many of them had been provided with pens like those at the
catalogue desks of the British Museum! Admirable pens! that may be put
to so many uses and should be put into so many hands to-day and
to-morrow. Admirable pens! and yet no one has praised them before.
Admirable pens that will not write; and, by the way, how unlike those
which wrote this:—
"Caldecot Castle, a grand and spacious edifice of high antiquity, occurs
to arrest the observation of the passing stranger about two miles beyond
the new passage; appearing at no great distance across the meadows that
lie to the left of the Newport road. The shattered remnants of this
curious example of early military architecture are still so far
considerable as to be much more interesting than we could possibly have
been at first aware, and amply repaid the trouble of a visit we bestowed
upon it, in our return through Monmouthshire by the way of Caldecot
village. In the distance truly it does not fail to impress the mind with
some idea of its ancient splendour, for it assumes an aspect of no
common dignity: a friendly mantling of luxuriant ivy improves, in an
eminent degree, the picturesque effect of its venerable mouldering
turrets; and, upon the whole, the ruin altogether would appear
unquestionably to great advantage, were it, fortunately for the admirers
of artless beauty, stationed in a more conspicuous situation, like the
greater number of edifices of a similar nature in other parts of the
country."
The decency, the dignity, the gentlemanliness (_circa_ 1778), the
fatuity of it, whether they tickle or affront, are more fascinating than
many better but less portentous things. There was, too, a Fellow of the
Royal Society who said in the last century that, in the Middle Ages, St.
Winifred's Well and Chapel, and the river, and Basingwerk, must have
been "worthy of a photograph."
[Illustration: YACHTS, ANGLESEY COAST]
Yet there are two others who might make any crowd respectable—the
lively, the keen-eyed, the versatile Mr. A. G. Bradley, and George
Borrow, whose very name has by this time absorbed and come to imply more
epithets than I have room to give. From the former, a contemporary, it
would be effrontery to quote. From the latter I allow myself the
pleasure of quoting at least this, and with the more readiness because
hereafter it cannot justly be said that this book does not contain a
fine thing about Wales. Borrow had just been sitting (bareheaded) in the
outdoor chair of Huw Morus, whose songs he had read "in the most distant
part of Lloegr, when he was a brown-haired boy"; and on his way back to
Llangollen, he had gone into a little inn, where the Tarw joins the
Ceiriog brook. "'We have been to Pont-y-Meibion,' said Jones, 'to see
the chair of Huw Morus,' adding, that the Gwr Boneddig was a great
admirer of the songs of the Eos Ceiriog. He had no sooner said these
words than the intoxicated militiaman started up, and, striking the
table with his fist, said: 'I am a poor stone-cutter—this is a rainy day
and I have come here to pass it in the best way I can. I am somewhat
drunk, but though I am a poor stone-mason, a private in the militia, and
not so sober as I should be, I can repeat more of the songs of the Eos
than any man alive, however great a gentleman, however sober—more than
Sir Watkin, more than Colonel Biddulph himself.'
"He then began to repeat what appeared to be poetry, for I could
distinguish the rhymes occasionally, though owing to his broken
utterance it was impossible for me to make out the sense of the words.
Feeling a great desire to know what verses of Huw Morus the intoxicated
youth would repeat, I took out my pocket-book and requested Jones, who
was much better acquainted with Welsh pronunciation, under any
circumstances, than myself, to endeavour to write down from the mouth of
the young fellow any verses uppermost in his mind. Jones took the
pocket-book and pencil and went to the window, followed by the young
man, scarcely able to support himself. Here a curious scene took place,
the drinker hiccuping up verses, and Jones dotting them down, in the
best manner he could, though he had evidently great difficulty to
distinguish what was said to him. At last methought the young man said,
'There they are, the verses of the Nightingale (Eos), on his
deathbed....'
[Illustration: BEAUMARIS—MOONLIGHT]
"... A scene in a public-house, yes! but in a Welsh public-house. Only
think of a Suffolk toper repeating the deathbed verses of a poet; surely
there is a considerable difference between the Celt and the Saxon?"
But the number is so great of sensible, educated men who have written on
Wales, or would have written if business or pleasure or indolence or
dislike of fame had not prevented them, that either I find it impossible
to visit the famous places (and if I visit them, my predecessors fetter
my capacity and actually put in abeyance the powers of the places), or,
very rarely, I see that they were imperfect tellers of the truth, and
yet feel myself unwilling to say an unpleasant new thing of village or
mountain because it will not be believed, and a pleasant one because it
puts so many excellent people in the wrong. Of Wales, therefore, as a
place consisting of Llandudno, Llangammarch, Llanwrtyd, Builth,
Barmouth, Penmaenmawr, Llanberis, Tenby, ... and the adjacent streams
and mountains, I cannot speak. At ——, indeed, I ate poached salmon and
found it better than any preserver of rivers would admit; it was dressed
and served by an Eluned (Lynette), with a complexion so like a rose that
I missed the fragrance, and movements like those of a fountain when the
south wind blows; and all the evening they sang, or when they did not
sing, their delicate voices made "llech" and "llawr" lovely words: but I
remember nothing else. At —— I heard some one playing _La ci darem la
mano_: and I remember nothing else. Then, too, there was ——, with its
castle and cross and the memory of the anger of a king: and I remember
that the rain outside my door was the only real thing in the world
except the book in my hand; for the trees were as the dreams of one who
does not care for dreams; the mountains were as things on a map; and the
men and women passing were but as words unspoken and without melody. All
I remember of —— is that, as I drew near to it on a glorious wet Sunday
in winter, on the stony roads, the soles began to leave my boots. I knew
no one there; I was to reach a place twelve miles ahead among the
mountains; I was assured that nobody in the town would cobble on Sunday:
and I began to doubt whether, after all, I had been wise in steadily
preferring football boots to good-looking things at four times the
price; when, finally, I had the honour of meeting a Baptist—a
Christian—a man—who, for threepence, fixed my soles so firmly that he
assured me they would last until I reached the fiery place to which he
believed I was travelling, and serve me well there. I distrusted his
theology, and have yet to try them on "burning marl," but they have
taken me some hundreds of miles on earth since then.
[Illustration: THE BEACH, BEAUMARIS]
It would be an impertinence to tell the reader what Llangollen is like,
especially as he probably knows and I do not. Also, I confess that its
very notoriety stupefies me, and I see it through a cloud of newspapers
and books, and amid a din of applausive voices, above which towers a
tremendous female form "like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved," which I
suppose to be Lady Eleanor Butler.
Nevertheless, I will please myself and the discerning reader by
repeating the names of a few of the places to which I have never been,
or of which I will not speak, namely, Llangollen, Aberglaslyn,
Bettws-y-Coed, the Fairy Glen, Capel Curig, Colwyn, Tintern, Bethesda,
Llanfairfechan, Llanrhaiadr, Llanynys, Tenby (a beautiful flower with a
beetle in it), Mostyn, Glyder Fach and Glyder Fawr, Penmaenmawr,
Pen-y-Gader, Pen-y-Gwryd, Prestatyn, Tremadoc, the Swallow Falls, the
Devil's Bridge, the Mumbles, Harlech, Portmadoc, Towyn, and Aberdovey
(with its song and still a poet there). I have read many lyrics worse
than that inventory.
* * * * *
But there is another kind of human being—to use a comprehensive
term—of which I stand in almost as much awe as of authors and those
who know the famous things of Wales. I mean the lovers of the Celt.
They do not, of course, confine their love—which in its extent and its
tenuity reminds one of a very great personage indeed—to the Celt; but
more perhaps than the Japanese or the Chinese or the Sandwich Islander
the Celt has their hearts; and I know of one who not only learned to
speak Welsh badly, but had the courage to rise at a public meeting and
exhort the (Welsh-speaking) audience to learn their "grand mother
tongue." Their aim and ideal is to go about the world in a state of
self-satisfied dejection, interrupted, and perhaps sustained, by days
when they consume strange mixed liquors to the tune of all the fine
old Celtic songs which are fashionable. If you can discover a possible
Celtic great-grandmother, you are at once among the chosen. I cannot
avoid the opinion that to boast of the Celtic spirit is to confess you
have it not. But, however that may be, and speaking as one who is
afraid of definitions, I should be inclined to call these lovers of
the Celt a class of "decadents," not unrelated to Mallarmé, and of
æsthetes, not unrelated to Postlethwaite. They are sophisticated,
neurotic—the fine flower of sounding cities—often producing exquisite
verse and prose; preferring _crême de menthe_ and _opal hush_ to
metheglin or stout, and Kensington to Eryri and Connemara; and
perplexed in the extreme by the Demetian with his taste in wall-papers
quite untrained. Probably it all came from Macpherson's words, "They
went forth to battle and they always fell"; just as much of their
writing is to be traced to the vague, unobservant things in Ossian, or
in the proud, anonymous Irishman who wrote _Fingal_ in six cantos in
1813. The latter is excellent in this vein. "Let none then despise,"
he writes, "the endeavour, however humble, now made, even by the aid
of fiction, to throw light upon the former manners and customs of _one
of the oldest and noblest nations of the earth_. That _once we were_,
is all we have left to boast of; that _once we were_, we have record
upon record.... We yet can show the stately pharos where waved the
chieftain's banner, and the wide ruin where the palace stood—the
palace once the pride of ages and the theme of song—once _Emuin a luin
Aras Ullah_." The reader feels that it is a baseness to exist. Mr.
John Davidson, who, of course, is as far removed from the professional
Celt as a battle-axe from a toothpick, has put something like the
fashionable view majestically into the mouth of his "Prime Minister":
... That offscouring of the Eastern world,
The melancholy Celt, whom Latin, Greek,
And Teuton drove through Europe to the rocks,
The utmost isles and precincts of the sea;
Who fight for fighting's sake, and understand
No meaning in defeat, having no cause
At heart, no depth of purpose, no profound
Desire, no inspiration, no belief;—
A twilight people living in a dream,
A withered dream they never had themselves,
A faded heirloom that their fathers dreamt:
How much more happy these had they destroyed
The spell of life at once, and so escaped
An unregarded martyrdom, the consciousness
Of inefficience and the world's contempt.
[Illustration: THE TROUT STREAM]
"An Earth-born coolness
Coloured with the sky."
But it is probably true that when one has said that the typical Celt is
seldom an Imperialist, a great landowner, a brewer, a cabinet minister,
or (in Wales, at least) a member of the Salvation Army, one has
exhausted the list of his weaknesses; and that not greatly wanting to be
one of these things, he has endeared himself to those to-day who have
set their hearts on gold and applause and have not gained them, and
those few others who never sought them. I heard of a pathetic, plausible
stockbroker's clerk the other day, who, having spent his wife's money
and been at last discovered by his tailor, took comfort in studying his
pedigree, which included a possibly Welsh Lewis high upon the extreme
right. He was sufficiently advanced in philology to find traces of an
Ap' in his name, which was Piper, and he could repeat some of Ossian by
heart with great emotion and less effect. I prefer the kind of Celt whom
I met in Wales one August night. It was a roaring wet night, and I
stepped into the shelter of a bridge to light a pipe. As I paused to see
if it was dawn yet, I heard a noise which I supposed to be the breathing
of a cow. My fishing-rod struck the bridge; the noise ceased, and I
heard something move in the darkness close by. I confess that my pipe
went out when, without warning, a joyous, fighting baritone voice rose
and shook the bridge with the words.
Through all the changing scenes of life,
In trouble and in joy,
The praises of my God shall still
My heart and tongue employ.
The voice sang all the verses of the hymn, and then laughed loudly, yet
with a wonderful serenity. Then a man stood up heavily with a sound like
a flock of starlings suddenly taking flight. I lit a match and held it
to his face and looked at him, and saw a fair-skinned, high-cheek-boned
face, wizened like a walnut, with much black hair about it, that yet did
not conceal the flat, straight, eloquent mouth. He lit a match and held
it to my face, and looked at me and laughed again. Finding that I could
pronounce Bwlch-y-Rhiw, he was willing to talk and to share the beer in
my satchel. And he told me that he had played many parts—he was always
playing—before he took to the road: he had been a booking-office clerk,
a soldier, a policeman, a gamekeeper, and put down what he called his
variability to "the feminine gender." He would not confess where he had
been to school, and his one touch of melancholy came when, to show that
he had once known Latin, he began to repeat, in vaguely divided
hexameters, the passage in the _Aeneid_ which begins _Est in conspectu
Tenedos_. For he could not go on after _At Capys_ and was angry with
himself. But he recalled being caned for the same inability, and laughed
once more. Every other incident remembered only fed his cheerfulness.
Everything human had his praise,—General Buller in particular. I cannot
say the same of his attitude towards the divine. His conversation raised
my spirits, and I suppose that the bleared and dripping dawn can have
peered on few less melancholy men than we. "Life," said he, "is a
plaguey thing: only I don't often remember it." And as he left me, he
remarked, apologetically, that he "always had been a cheerful ——, and
couldn't be miserable," and did me the honour of supposing that in this
he resembled me.
[Illustration: NEAR MENAI STRAITS]
He went off singing, in Welsh, something not in the least like a hymn to
a fine victorious hymn tune, but had changed, before I was out of
hearing, to the plaintive, adoring "Ar hyd y nos." And I remembered the
proverbial saying of the Welsh, that "the three strong ones of the
world" are "a lord, a headstrong man, and a pauper."
* * * * *
Having heard and read the aforesaid authors, tourists, higher
philatelists, and lovers of the Celt, I need hardly say, firstly, that I
have come under their influence; secondly, that I have tried to avoid
it; and thirdly, that I am not equal to the task of apportioning the
blame between them and myself for what I write.
And, first, let me ease my memory and pamper my eyes, and possibly make
a reader's brain reverberate with the sound of them, by giving the names
of some of the streams and lakes and villages I have known in Wales. And
among the rivers, there are Ebbw and Usk, that cut across my childhood
with silver bars, and cloud it with their apple flowers and their
mountain-ash trees, and make it musical with the curlew's despair and
the sound of the blackbird singing in Eden still; and Towy and Teivy and
Cothi and Ystwyth; and, shyer streams, the old, deserted, perhaps
deserted, pathways of the early gods, the Dulais and Marlais and Gwili
and Aman and Cenen and Gwenlais and Gwendraeth Fawr and Sawdde and
Sawdde Fechan and Twrch and Garw; and those nameless but not
unremembered ones (and yet surely no river in Wales but has a name if
one could only know it well enough) that crossed the road like welcomed
lingerers from some happier day, flashing and snake-like, and ever about
to vanish and never vanishing, and vocal all in reed or pebble or sedge,
some deep enough for a sewin, others too shallow to wash the dust from
the little pea-like toes of the barefooted child that learns from them
how Nile and Ganges flow, and why Abana and Pharpar were dear, and why
these are more sweet; and there is Llwchwr, whose voice is bright in
constant shadow; and Wye; and the little river in a stony valley of
Gower which at first reminded me, and always reminds me, of the
adventure of Sir Marhaus, Sir Gawaine, and Sir Uwaine.
"And so they rode, and came into a deep valley full of stones, and
thereby they saw a fair stream of water; above thereby was the head of
the stream a fair fountain, and three damosels sitting thereby. And then
they rode to them, and either saluted other, and the eldest had a
garland of gold about her head, and she was threescore winter of age or
more, and her hair was white under the garland. The second damosel was
of thirty winter of age, with a circlet of gold about her head. The
third damosel was but fifteen year of age, and a garland of flowers
about her head. When the knights had so beheld them, they asked them the
cause why they sat at that fountain? 'We be here,' said the damosels,
'for this cause: if we may see any errant knights, to teach them unto
strange adventures; and ye be three knights that seeken adventures, and
we be three damosels, and therefore each one of you must choose one of
us; and when ye have done so we will lead you unto three highways, and
there each of you shall choose a way and his damosel with him. And this
day twelvemonth ye must meet here again, and God send you your lives,
and thereto ye must plight your troth.' 'This is well said,' said Sir
Marhaus." And no other than a Welsh story-teller could have made that
clear picture of the three damosels.
And there is Severn in its wild and unnoted childhood, its lovely and
gallant youth, its noble and romantic prime, as it leaves Wales and
passes Shrewsbury, the pattern of all famous streams—
Fluminaque antiquos subterlabentia muros;
and its solemn, grey, and mighty and worldly-wise old age, listening to
its latest daughter the Wye, where it has
A cry from the sea, a cry from the mountain;
and Clwyd and Conway and Ceiriog and Aled and Dovey, streams that
remember princes and bards; and the little waters flowing from Cwellyn
Lake, of which a story is told.
[Illustration: NEAR BANGOR]
Near the river which falls from Cwellyn Lake, they say that the fairies
used to dance in a meadow on fair moonlit nights. One evening the heir
to the farm of Ystrad, to which the meadow belonged, hid himself in a
thicket near the meadow. And while the fairies were dancing, he ran out
and carried off one of the fairy women. The others at once disappeared.
She resisted and cried, but he led her to his home, where he was tender
to her, so that she was willing to remain as his maid-servant. But she
would not tell him her name. Some time afterward he again saw the
fairies in the meadow and overheard one of them saying, "The last time
we met here, our sister Penelope was snatched away from us by one of the
mortals." So he returned and offered to marry her, because she was
hard-working and beautiful. For a long time she would not consent; but
at last she gave way, on the condition "that if ever he should strike
her with iron, she would leave him and never return to him again." They
were happy together for many years; and she bore him a son and a
daughter; and so wise and active was she, that he became one of the
richest men of that country, and besides the farm of Ystrad, he farmed
all the lands on the north side of Nant-y-Bettws to the top of Snowdon,
and all Cwm Brwynog in Llanberis, or about five thousand acres. But one
day Penelope went with him into a field to catch a horse; and as the
horse ran away from him, he was angry and threw the bridle at him, but
struck Penelope instead. She disappeared. He never saw her again, but
one night afterward he heard her voice at his window, asking him to take
care of the children, in these words:
Oh, lest my son should suffer cold,
Him in his father's coat enfold:
Lest cold should seize my darling fair,
For her, her mother's robe prepare.
These children and their descendants were called the Pellings, says the
teller of the tale; and "there are," he adds, "still living several
opulent and respectable persons who are known to have sprung from the
_Pellings_. The best blood in my own veins is this fairy's."
[Illustration: A FOOTPATH ON THE GREAT ORME]
And of lakes, I have known Llyn-y-Fan Fach, the lonely, deep, gentle
lake on the Caermarthen Fan, two thousand feet high, where, if the dawn
would but last a few moments longer, or could one swim but just once
more across, or sink but a little lower in its loving icy depths, one
would have such dreams that the legend of the shepherd and the lady whom
he loved and gained and lost upon the edge of it would fade away: and
Llyn Llech Owen, and have wondered that only one legend should be
remembered of those that have been born of all the gloom and the golden
lilies and the plover that glories in its loneliness; for I stand in
need of a legend when I come down to it through rolling heathery land,
through bogs, among blanched and lichened crags, and the deep sea of
heather, with a few flowers and many withered ones, of red and purple
whin, of gorse and gorse-flower, and (amongst the gorse) a grey curling
dead grass, which all together make the desolate colour of a "black
mountain"; and when I see the water for ever waved except among the
weeds in the centre, and see the waterlily leaves lifted and resembling
a flock of wild-fowl, I cannot always be content to see it so remote, so
entirely inhuman, and like a thing a poet might make to show a fool what
solitude was, and as it remains with its one poor legend of a man who
watered his horse at a well, and forgot to cover it with the stone, and
riding away, saw the water swelling over the land from the well, and
galloped back to stop it, and saw the lake thus created and bounded by
the track of his horse's hooves; and thus it is a thing from the
beginning of the world that has never exchanged a word with men, and now
never will, since we have forgotten the language, though on some days
the lake seems not to have forgotten it. And I have known the sombre
Cenfig water among the sands, where I found the wild goose feather with
which I write.
And I have seen other waters; but least of them all can I forget the
little unnecessary pool that waited alongside a quiet road and near a
grim, black village. Reed and rush and moss guarded one side of it, near
the road; a few hazels overhung the other side; and in their
discontented writhing roots there was always an empty moorhen's nest,
and sometimes I heard the bird hoot unseen (a sound by which the pool
complained, as clearly as the uprooted trees over the grave of Polydorus
complained), and sometimes in the unkind grey haze of winter dawns, I
saw her swimming as if vainly she would disentangle herself from the two
golden chains of ripples behind her. In the summer, the surface was a
lawn of duckweed on which the gloom from the hazels found something to
please itself with, in a slow meditative way, by showing how green could
grow from a pure emerald, at the edge of the shadow, into a brooding
vapourish hue in the last recesses of the hazels. The smell of it made
one shudder at it, as at poison. An artist would hardly dare to sit near
enough to mark all the greens, like a family of snaky essences, from the
ancient and mysterious one within to the happy one in the sun. When the
duckweed had dissolved in December, the pool did but whisper that of all
things in that season, when
Blue is the mist and hollow the corn parsnep,
it alone rejoiced. It was in sight of the smoke and the toy-like
chimney-stacks of the village, of new houses all around, and of the
mountains. It had no possible use—nothing would drink of it. It did not
serve as a sink, like the blithe stream below. It produced neither a
legend nor a brook. It was a whole half-acre given up to a moorhen and
innumerable frogs. It was not even beautiful. And yet, there was the
divinity of the place, embodied, though there was no need for that, in
the few broken brown reeds that stood all the winter, each like a
capital Greek _lambda_, out of the water. When the pool harboured the
image of the moon for an hour in a winter night, it seemed to be
comforted. But when the image had gone, the loss of that lovely captive
was more eloquent than the little romantic hour. And I think that, after
all, the pool means the beauty of a pure negation, the sweetness of
utter and resolved despair, the greatness of Death itself.
And I have been to Abertillery, Pontypool, Caerleon, infernal Landore,
Gower, Pontardulais, Dafen, Llanedi, Llanon (where only the little Gwili
runs, but good children are told that they shall go to Llanon docks),
Pen-y-Groes, Capel Hendre, Maesy-bont, Nantgaredig, Bolgoed, Pentre
Bach, Bettws, Amanford, Llandebie, Pentre Gwenlais, Derwydd, Ffairfach,
Llandeilo, Tal-y-Llychau, Brynamman, Gwynfe, Llanddeusant, Myddfai,
Cil-y-Cwm, Rhandir Mwyn, and the farms beyond,—Maes Llwyn Fyddau,
Bwlch-y-Rhiw, Garthynty, Nant-yr-ast, Blaen Cothi, Blaen
Twrch,—Llanddewi Brefi, Tregaron, Pont Llanio, Llanelltyd, Bettws
Garmon, Bala, Aber Dusoch.... And I have crossed many "black" mountains,
and Gareg Lwyd, Gareg Las, the Banau Sir Gaer, Crugian Ladies, Caeo,
Bryn Ceilogiau, Craig Twrch, and Craig-y-Ddinas....
[Illustration: A VIEW FROM THE GREAT ORME'S HEAD]
The chapels and churches, Siloh, Ebenezer, Llanedi, Llandefan,
Abergwesyn, Llanddeusant, ... but I dare not name them lest I should
disturb some one's dreams, or invite some one to disturb my own. They
are all in the admirable guide-books, which say nothing of the calm and
the nettles and the shining lizards and the sleepy luxurious Welsh
reading of the lessons at ——; and the wet headstones at ——, where you
may lean on any Sunday in the rain and hear the hymn take heaven by
storm, and quarrel melodiously upon the heights, and cease and leave the
soul wandering in the rain as far from heaven as Paolo and Francesca in
their drifts of flame; and ——, white and swept and garnished, and always
empty, and always lighted by a twilight four hundred years old, the door
being open and ready to receive some god or goddess that delays; and
Soar at ——, so blank, lacking in beauty and even in ugliness,—so blank
that when one enters, the striving spirit will not be content, and
perforce takes flight and finds an adventure not unlike that of the man
who was once returning from Beddgelert fair by a gloomy road, and saw a
great and splendid house conspicuously full of gaiety in a place where
no such house had seemed to stand before; and supposing that he had lost
his way, he asked and was given a lodging, and found the chambers bright
and sounding with young men and women and children, and slept deeply in
a fine room, on a soft white bed, and on waking and studying his
neighbourhood, saw but a bare swamp and a tuft of rushes beneath his
head.
And there is Siloh at ——, standing bravely,—at night, it often seems
perilously,—at the end of a road, beyond which rise immense mountains
and impassable, and, in my memory, always the night and a little, high,
lonely moon, haunted for ever by a pale grey circle, looking like a
frail creature which one of the peaks had made to sail for his pleasure
across the terrible deeps of the sky. But Siloh stands firm, and
ventures once a week to send up a thin music that avails nothing against
the wind; although close to it, threatening it, laughing at it, able to
overwhelm it, should the laugh become cruel, is a company of elder
trees, which, seen at twilight, are sentinels embossed upon the
sky—sentinels of the invisible, patient, unconquerable powers: or (if
one is lighter-hearted) they seem the empty homes of what the mines and
chapels think they have routed; and at midnight they are not empty, and
they love the mountain rain, and at times they summon it and talk with
it, while the preacher thunders and the windows of the chapel gleam.
[Illustration:
OLD COTTAGE AND RUINS OF ABBEY, GREAT ORME'S HEAD
]
And there is ——, where an ancient, unwrinkled child used to talk in
gentle, melancholy accents about hell to an assembly of ancient men who
sometimes muttered "Felly, felly," as men who had heard it so often that
they longed to be there and to taste and to see; where the young men and
maidens sang so lustily and well that I wondered the minister never
heard them, or, hearing, understood them. To the children, when they
listened, his mild ferocity did but put an edge on the bird's-nesting of
the day before and the day after. When they did not listen, some of them
looked through the windows and saw heaven as fresh and gaudy, in the
flowers of a steep garden close by, as in the coloured pictures of
apostles and lambs on their bedroom walls; but chiefly in the company of
delicate lime trees that stood above the garden, on a grassy breast of
land. The fair, untrodden turf below them shone even when the sun was
not with it. The foliage of all the limes, in autumn, ripened together
to the same hue of gold. It burned and was cool. It flamed and yet had
something in it of the dusk. It was the same as when, many years ago,
two children saw in it some fellowship with the coloured windows at
Llandaff, and with the air of an old library that had "golden silence
and golden speech" over the door. And the trees seemed to be a council
of blessed creatures devising exquisite enjoyments and plotting to
outwit the preacher. They might be not ill-chosen deputies of leisure,
health, and contemplation, and all that fair and reverend family. In the
cool gloom at the centre of the foliage sat also Mystery, with palms
linked before her eyelids, unlinking them but seldom, lest seeing might
shut out visions.