he end of all things,--the
end of his own ideals, the extinction of all Cymric hopes. So poignant
is his grief, and in so universal a manner does the catastrophe of
Llywelyn's death present itself to him, that he imagines that all the
natural features of the Welsh fatherland know that the last great
Welshman is dead; the winds howl over the mountains, the rain-clouds
gather thick, the waves rage with grief against the Welsh coasts, and
far away on the hills the giant oak-trees beat against each other in the
fury of their passion. Sadly, in this manner, closes the second period
of Welsh literature.

4. _The Golden Age of the Cywydd, 1340-1440._--Just as, after the loss
of the North, the Welsh muse was hushed, so after the final subjugation
of Wales in 1282, hardly a note was heard for many a long year. The
ancient patrons of literature were dead, and the country had not yet
settled down to the steady rule of England. Indeed, the conquest of
Wales effectively put an end to the older Welsh poetry of that type
which we noticed in the last period. These older bards were without
exception subjects of the princes of North Wales, where the old heroic
poetry was still popular, and when the power of these princes came to an
end the old poetry too ceased. When the Welsh muse emerges again from
the darkness of this interval she is no longer of the North; the new
poets are drawn from the Welshmen of the South, a land which had
practically ceased to be a part of an independent Wales shortly after
the Norman conquest of England. We find, too, that the poetry which
poured forth from the Welsh bards of the south is of an altogether
different type, it is modern in all its essentials, in diction, in
language, and, comparatively speaking, in sentiment. Indeed, there is an
infinitely greater difference between Dafydd ab Gwilym and Gruffydd ab
yr Ynad Coch than there is between him and any poet writing in the
alliterative metres in the 19th century. So that we must suppose that at
the time when the poets of North Wales still sang of war and
mead-drinking in a style and diction that was an inheritance from the
times of the _Gododin_, the poets of the South, unharassed by wars, were
developing a new poetry of their own, a poetry that had relinquished for
ever the Old Welsh models and was at last in line with the great
poetical movements of Europe. And, judging from the fact that the
earliest of these poets whose works are accessible to us are