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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: SNOWDON FROM CWM-Y-GLO]

"'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:

A BIDDING TO A MARRIAGE

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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: SNOWDON FROM TRAETH MAWR]

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.

[Illustration:

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.

[Illustration: IN THE LLEDR VALLEY]

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.

[Illustration: DUFFWS MOUNTAIN]

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.

[Illustration: DUFFWS MOUNTAIN IN MIST]

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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: ABERGLASLYN]

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.

[Illustration: 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:—

[Illustration: THE MAIDS OF CAERMARTHENSHIRE]

1st verse.

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.

2nd verse.

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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: VALLE CRUCIS ABBEY]

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.

[Illustration: VIEW OF LLANGOLLEN]

"'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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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—

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: BARMOUTH BRIDGE]

_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.

[Illustration: 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:

[Illustration]

[Illustration: 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:—

[Illustration]

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.

[Illustration: 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—

[Illustration]

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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: NEAR PENMAEN POOL—NOON]

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.

[Illustration: VIEW OF CADER IDRIS]

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....