veral Merlins, however, there are two Taliesins: there
is the fifth-century Taliesin, and there is the pseudo-Taliesin of the
twelfth. Both are wonderful in their way, and one knows not which to
admire most--him who wrote the 'Battle of Gwenystrad,' which is
undoubtedly a primitive war song, or the mediaeval poet who chose to
take the disguise of Taliesin, and taking too, probably, some of the
traditional fragments of his early poetry, worked them up afresh with
curious mediaeval art and mystic imagination. For comparison let us
take an early and a late poem, commonly gathered, as in the 'Myvyrian
Archaeology,' under one head.

Take first one of the later poems, the mystical 'Song to the Wind,'
which even in its English dress won Emerson's admiration, and which,
if we allow for all differences between mediaeval and modern
imagination, is as wonderful a poem of its kind as any literature is
likely to afford. As it is given among our selections, it need not be
quoted here. In point of time it is usual to assign it, as Stephens
does, to the twelfth or thirteenth century. But it seems to me to bear
traces again of being an older, more primitive poem, retouched
certainly, and probably reshaped, by a twelfth-century poet. And now
for a genuine Taliesin, or what at any rate many critics think to be
genuine. This you may have in the famous 'Gwaith Gwenystrad' (Battle
of Gwenystrad), one of the most spirited war poems in existence,
copied and recopied by a long succession of Kymric scribes, and which
the writer came upon first in the MS. collection of William Morris o
Gaergybi yn Mon, who flourished about 1758. Here are four lines of
Morris's copy _literatim_, which will give a better idea than any
criticism of mine of the mingled realism and imagination of the
poem:--

"Yn nrws rhyd gwelais i wyr lledruddion,
Eirf ddillwng y rhag blawt gofedon,
Unynt tanc gan aethant golludion,
Llaw ynghroes gryd ygro granwynion."

And here is a rough, vigorous translation of these lines from the same
volume:--

"In the pass of the fort have I seen men, dyed with red, who
hurtled their arms.... They fell to the ground together when
the day was lost, their hands on the crucifix. And horror was
in the pale face of the dead warriors."

A succeeding line,

"A gwyar a uaglei ar ddillad,"
(And the blood was tangled in their clothing),

adds the last touch of dreadful sincerity to the account. And in