grass o'ergrows each mouldering tomb, and the brook, as it
ripples by in a darksome aldered hollow, speaks in a language which man
knows no more, but which is answered in the same forgotten tongue by the
thousand-year yew as it rustles in the breeze. And when there are Runic
stones in this garden of God, where He raises souls, I often fancy that
this old dialect is written in their rhythmic lines. The yew-trees were
planted by law, lang-syne, to yield bows to the realm, and now archery is
dead and Martini-Henry has taken its place, but the yews still live, and
the Runic fine art of the twisted lines on the tombs, after a thousand
years' sleep, is beginning to revive. Every thing at such a time speaks
of joy and resurrection--tree and tomb and bird and flower and bee.

These are all memories of a walk from the town of Aberystwith, in Wales,
which walk leads by an ancient church, in the soul garden of which are
two Runic cross tombstones. One day I went farther afield to a more
ancient shrine, on the top of a high mountain. This was to the summit of
Cader Idris, sixteen miles off. On this summit there is a Druidical
circle, of which the stones, themselves to ruin grown, are strange and
death-like old. Legend says that this is the burial-place of Taliesin,
the first of Welsh bards, the primeval poet of Celtic time. Whoever
sleeps on the grave will awake either a madman or a poet, or is at any
rate unsafe to become one or the other. I went, with two friends, afoot
on this little pilgrimage. Both were professors at one of the great
universities. The elder is a gentleman of great benevolence, learning,
and gentleness; the other, a younger man, has been well polished and
sharpened by travel in many lands. It is rumored that he has preached
Islam in a mosque unto the Moslem even unto taking up a collection, which
is the final test of the faith which reaches forth into a bright
eternity. That he can be, as I have elsewhere noted, a Persian unto
Persians, and a Romany among Roms, and a professional among the
hanky-pankorites, is likewise on the cards, as surely as that he knows
the roads and all the devices and little games of them that dwell
thereon. Though elegant enough in his court dress and rapier when he
kisses the hand of our sovereign lady the queen, he appears such an
abandoned rough when he goes a-fishing that the innocent and guileless
gypsies, little suspecting that a _rye_ lies _perdu_ in his wrap-rascal