tenements, and waterways in the possession of Darnell's ancestors. Here,
then, he read of the Holy Well, hidden in the Wistman's Wood--_Sylva
Sapientum_--'a fountain of abundant water, which no heats of summer can
ever dry, which no flood can ever defile, which is as a water of life,
to them that thirst for life, a stream of cleansing to them that would
be pure, and a medicine of such healing virtue that by it, through the
might of God and the intercession of His saints, the most grievous
wounds are made whole.' But the water of this well was to be kept
sacred perpetually, it was not to be used for any common purpose, nor to
satisfy any bodily thirst; but ever to be esteemed as holy, 'even as the
water which the priest hath hallowed.' And in the margin a comment in a
later hand taught Darnell something of the meaning of these
prohibitions. He was warned not to use the Well of Life as a mere luxury
of mortal life, as a new sensation, as a means of making the insipid cup
of everyday existence more palatable. 'For,' said the commentator, 'we
are not called to sit as the spectators in a theatre, there to watch the
play performed before us, but we are rather summoned to stand in the
very scene itself, and there fervently to enact our parts in a great and
wonderful mystery.'

Darnell could quite understand the temptation that was thus indicated.
Though he had gone but a little way on the path, and had barely tested
the over-runnings of that mystic well, he was already aware of the
enchantment that was transmuting all the world about him, informing his
life with a strange significance and romance. London seemed a city of
the Arabian Nights, and its labyrinths of streets an enchanted maze; its
long avenues of lighted lamps were as starry systems, and its immensity
became for him an image of the endless universe. He could well imagine
how pleasant it might be to linger in such a world as this, to sit apart
and dream, beholding the strange pageant played before him; but the
Sacred Well was not for common use, it was for the cleansing of the
soul, and the healing of the grievous wounds of the spirit. There must
be yet another transformation: London had become Bagdad; it must at
last be transmuted to Syon, or in the phrase of one of his old
documents, the City of the Cup.

And there were yet darker perils which the Iolo MSS. (as his father had
named the collection) hinted at more or less obscurely. There were
suggestions of an awf