Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) BEAUTIFUL WALES AGENTS IN AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK [Illustration: THE STACK, HOLYHEAD] BEAUTIFUL WALES PAINTED BY ROBERT FOWLER Â· RÂ·I Â· DESCRIBED BY EDWARD THOMAS WITH A NOTE ON MR. FOWLER'S LANDSCAPES BY ALEX. J. FINBERG PUBLISHED BY A. & C. BLACK Â· LONDON Â· 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. BeaumarisâMoonlight 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 BenarthâEarly Morning 36 16. Near Colwyn Bay 38 17. Distant View of PenmaenmawrâEarly Morning Light 42 18. Silvery Light, Conway Shore 44 19. A Mountain PassâNoon 48 20. Conway Castle and QuayâNoon 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, CarnarvonshireâEvening Glow 68 27. Bridge, Cwm-y-GloâEvening 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 LakeâSummer 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 HarlechâAfternoon 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 PoolâNoon 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'sâBishop'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 naÃ¯vetÃ© 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:â "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 respectableâthe 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-cutterâthis 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 soberâmore 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: BEAUMARISâMOONLIGHT] "... 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 ââ, 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 ââ I heard some one playing _La ci darem la mano_: and I remember nothing else. Then, too, there was ââ, 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 ââ 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 Baptistâa Christianâa manâwho, 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 beingâto use a comprehensive termâof 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 loveâwhich in its extent and its tenuity reminds one of a very great personage indeedâto 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 MallarmÃ©, and of Ã¦sthetes, not unrelated to Postlethwaite. They are sophisticated, neuroticâthe fine flower of sounding citiesâoften producing exquisite verse and prose; preferring _crÃªme 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 stoodâthe palace once the pride of ages and the theme of songâonce _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;â 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 partsâhe was always playingâbefore 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,âGeneral 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 ââ, 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 streamsâ 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 useânothing 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,âMaes Llwyn Fyddau, Bwlch-y-Rhiw, Garthynty, Nant-yr-ast, Blaen Cothi, Blaen Twrch,âLlanddewi 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 ââ; and the wet headstones at ââ, 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 ââ, 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 ââ, so blank, lacking in beauty and even in ugliness,âso 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 ââ, standing bravely,âat night, it often seems perilously,âat 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 skyâsentinels 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 ââ, 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. CHAPTER II ENTERING WALES The best way into Wales is the way you choose, provided that you care. Some may like the sudden modern way of going to sleep at London in a train and remaining asleep on a mountain-side, which has the advantage of being the most expensive and the least surprising way. Some may like to go softly into the land along the Severn, on foot, and going through sheath after sheath of the country, to reach at last the heart of it at peaty Tregaron, or the soul of it on Plynlimmon itself. Or you may go by train at night; and at dawn, on foot, follow a little stream at its own pace and live its fortnight's life from mountain to sea. [Illustration: BREEZY MORNING, LLANDUDNO BAY] Or you may cross the Severn and then the lower Wye, and taking Tredegar and Caerleon alternately, or Rhigws and Landore, or Cardiff and Lantwit, or the Rhondda Valley and the Vale of Neath, and thus sharpening the spirit, as an epicure may sharpen his palate, by opposites, find true Wales everywhere, whether the rivers be ochre and purple with corruption, or still as silver as the fountain dew on the mountain's beard; whether the complexions of the people be pure as those of the young cockle-women of Penclawdd, or as heavily superscribed as those of tin-platers preparing to wash. Or you may get no harm by treading in the footsteps of that warm-blooded antiquarian, Pennant, who wrote at the beginning of his tours in Wales: "With obdurate valour we sustained our independency ... against the power of a kingdom more than twelve times larger than Wales: and at length had the glory of falling, when a divided country, beneath the arms of the most wise and most warlike of the English monarchs." That "we" may have saved the soul even of an antiquarian. But the entry I best remember and most love was made by a child whom I used to know better than I have known anyone else. He disappeared, after a slow process of evanishment, several years ago: and I will use what I know as if it were my own, since the first person singular will help me to write as if I should never be subjected to the dignity of print,âas if I were addressing, not the general reader, but some one who cared. At a very early age, I (that is to say, he, _bien entendu_) often sat in a room in outer London, where I now see that it was probably good to be. It was always October there, and the yellow poplar leaves were always falling. And so also there was always a fireâa casket in which emeralds and sapphires contended with darker spirits continually. Where are the poplars now? Where the leaves which loved the frost that spoiled them at last? Where the emeralds and sapphiresâand the child? There were late October twilights that seemed so mighty in their gentleness and so terrible in their silence that they alarmed the child with fear of desolation, until the spell was suspended by lighted lamps and drawn curtains and fearless voices of elder persons, though one could draw the curtains and see the thing still, and oneself, and the very fire, outside in its embrace. And still The jealous ear of night eave-dropped our talk. [Illustration: COUNTRY LANE] I think those twilights have overwhelmed all at last, and they have their way with child and trees and fire. But they have spared one thing, which even in those days was more puissant than the fire, though they have left their marks upon it, and now it seems a less mighty thing if one goes to it soberly too critically, or even too cheerfully. For a picture hung in the room, and the last October sunlight used to fall upon it when the silence set in. The picture meant Wales. In the foreground, a stream shone with ripples in the midst, and glowed with foam among the roots of alders at the edge. Branches with white berries overhung the stream; and there were hornbeams and writhen oaks; and beyond them, a sky with a shaggy and ancient storm in it, and wrestling with that, and rising into it, the ruins of an Early English chancel. The strength and anger and tenderness and majesty of it were one great thought. I still think that could deeds spring panoplied from thoughts, and could great thoughts of themselves do anything but flush the cheek, such a simply curving landscape as this would be at the bidding of one of those great thoughts that empty all the brain.... Under one of the columns by the chancel, the artist meant to have drawn vaguely a pile of masonry and a muscular ivy stem. And that was the point of the picture, because it seemed to be a kneeling knight, with one forearm on an oval shield and the other buried in his beard, and his head bent. I suppose that the thought that it was a knight, and that the knight was Launcelot, first came as I looked at the picture once, straight from a book where I had been reading: "Then Sir Launcelot departed, and when he came to the Chapel Perilous, he alighted, and tied his horse to a little gate. And as soon as he was within the churchyard he saw on the front of the Chapel many fair, rich shields turned upside down; and many of the shields Sir Launcelot had seen knights have before; with that he saw standing by him thirty great knights, more by a yard than any man that he had ever seen, and all these grinned and gnashed at Sir Launcelot; and when he saw their countenances he dreaded them sore, and so put his shield afore him, and took his sword in his hand ready to do battle; and they were all armed in black harness, ready with their shields and swords drawn. And when Sir Launcelot would have gone through them they scattered on every side of him, and gave him the way to pass; and therewith he waxed all bold, and entered into the Chapel, and there he saw no light but a dim lamp burning, and then he was aware of a corse covered with a cloth of silk. And as Sir Launcelot stooped down and cut a piece of the cloth away, the earth quaked, and he was afraid...." [Illustration: A NOCTURNE, LLANDUDNO BAY] And the picture was a picture of the Chapel Perilous; and thus out of a poor story-book and a dear picture and the dim poplars in the dim street, I made a Launcelot who was not merely an incredible mediÃ¦val knight of flesh and armour, but a strange immortal figure that lived and was desirable and friendly in the grey rain of a suburb in the nineteenth century. * * * * * This was the beginning of the creation of Wales. Or shall I say that it was the beginning of the discovery? Let the reader decide, with the help of the explanation, that I use the words as I should use them of a play of Shakespeare's, or a picture of Titian's, or any other living thing which grows and changes and is born again, in age after age, as certainly and as elusively as the substance of a waterfall is changed; even in one moment these things are never the same to any two observers, backward or advanced, egotistical or servile, blind or keen.... Looking back, the artistry of time makes it appear that soon after I had become certain that the painter had somehow caught Launcelot kneeling at the foot of the column, I reached Wales. There I saw one of the Round Tables of Arthur, but also a porpoise hunt in the river close by; and the porpoise threshed the water so that the shining spray now hides the Round Table from my view. And I heard the national anthem of Wales: and at first I cowered beneath the resolved and terrible despair of it, forgetting thatâ In every dirge there sleeps a battle-march; so that I seemed to look out from the folds of a fantastic purple curtain of heavily embroidered fabric upon a fair landscape and an awful sky; and I know not whether the landscape or the sky was the more fascinating in its mournfulness. And I heard sounds of insult, shame, and wrong, And trumpets blown for wars,â and it was of Arthur's last battle that I dreamed. But the sky cleared, and I seemed to let go of the folds of the curtain and to see a red dragon triumphing and the shielded Sir Launcelot again; and next, it was only a tournament that I saw, and there were careless ladies on high among the golden dust. And, at last, I could once more think happily of the little white house where I lived, and the largest and reddest apples in all the world that grew upon the wizened orchard, and the smoked salmon and the hams that perfumed the long kitchen, and all the shining candlesticks, and
{'title': 'Beautiful Wales by Edward Thomas', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}