All sorts of sights and sounds might be expected on our Terrace, but
that which especially warmed the heart of exile in us, and pleased the
fancy of other sojourners was the appearance, one evening, of a stately
band of tall men in evening dress and top-hats, with musical instruments
in their grasp, and heads lifted high above their Welsh following. We
called the Power behind the Throne to the window in our question and she
gave a glad cry: “Oh, they’re the Neegurs! They’re the white Neegurs!”
and at sight of our compatriotic faces at the pane, these beautiful
giants took their stand before our house, and burst into the familiar
music of the log-cabin, the stern-wheel steamboat, and the cornfield, as
well as the ragtime melodies of later days. It was a rich moment, and
I know not which joyed in it more, the Welsh Power or the American
Sufferance.
But here, before I go farther afield, I must note a main difference
between the Welsh Power and the English slavey to whom she corresponded
in calling and condition. She was so far educated as to know the
pseudonym of the friend who came to see us, and to have read his
writings in the _Welsh Gazette_, treating our proposed triumph in his
distinction with the fine scorn she used for all our airs. If she had
been an old-fashioned Yankee Help she could not have been more snubbing;
but when we had been taught to know our place she was more tolerant, and
finally took leave of us without rancor.
The notion of the general Welsh education which her intelligence gave us
was carried indefinitely farther by the grocer’s boy to whom our friend
presented me one evening, after he had been struggling to make me
understand what an _englyn_ was. I am able now to explain that it is a
polite stanza which the Welsh send with a present of fruit or flowers,
or for a greeting upon any worthy occasion. It is rhymed, sometimes
at both ends of the lines, and sometimes in the middle of them, and it
presents all the difficulties of euphony which the indomitable Welsh
glory in overcoming. But when my friend took me in hand, my ignorance
was of so dense a surface that he could make no impression on it, and he
said at last, “Let us go into this grocery. There’s a boy here who will
_show_ you what an englyn is,” and after I was introduced the kind youth
did so with pleasure, while he sold candles to one customer, soap to
another, cheese to another, and herring to another. He first wrote the
englyn in Welsh, and when I had sufficiently admired it in that tongue
(for which no atavistic knowledge really served me), he said he would
put it into English, and he did so. It was then not rhymed at both ends
or in the middle, but it was rhymed quite enough, and if it had not the
harp-like sweetness of the original, it was still such a musical stanza
that I shall always be sorry to have lost it. What I can never lose
the impression of is the wide-spread literary lore of the common Welsh
people which the incident suggested. I could not fancy even a Boston
grocer’s boy doing the like; and perhaps this was an uncommon boy in
Wales itself. He told me a good deal, which I have mainly forgotten,
about the state of polite learning in his country and in what honor the
living bards were held. It seems that in that rhyming and singing little
land, the poets are still known as of old by their bardic names. As
Jones, or Evans, or Edwards they have no fame beyond other men, but up
and down all Wales they are celebrated as this bard or that, and are
honored according to their poetic worth.