roes; rarely so
much esteemed as to be a snare, rarely a desire, rarely a reward; 'a
soft herd.' They praise drunkenness for its ecstasy, its uncalculating
generosity, and equal with the flowing of blood in battle, and the
flowing of mead in the hall, is the flowing of song. They have the
haughtiness of those who, if they take rewards, 'ale for the drinking,
and a fair homestead, and beautiful clothing,' give rewards: 'I am
Taliesin, who will repay thee thy banquet.'

And they have their philosophy, always a close, vehemently definite
thing, crying out for precise images, by which alone it can apprehend
the unseen. Taliesin knows that 'man is oldest when he is born, and is
younger and younger continually.' He wonders where man is when he is
sleeping, and where the night waits until the passing of day. He is
astonished that books have not found out the soul, and where it resides,
and the air it breathes, and its form and shape. He thinks, too, of the
dregs of the soul, and debates what is the best intoxication for its
petulance and wonder and mockery. And, in a poem certainly late, or
interpolated with fragments of a Latin hymn, he uses the eternal
numeration of the mystics, and speaks of 'the nine degrees of the
companies of heaven, and the tenth, saints a preparation of sevens';
numbers that are 'clean and holy.' And even in poems plainly Christian
there is a fine simplicity of imagination; as when, at the day of
judgment, an arm reaches out, and hides the sea and the stars; or when
Christ, hanging on the cross, laments that the bones of his feet are
stretched with extreme pain.

It is this sharp physical apprehension of things that really gives its
note to Welsh poetry; a sense of things felt and seen, so intense, that
the crutch on which an old man leans becomes the symbol of all the
bodily sorrow of the world. In the poem attributed to Llywarch Hen there
is a fierce, loud complaint, in which mere physical sickness and the
intolerance of age translate themselves into a limitless hunger, and
into that wisdom which is the sorrowful desire of beauty. The cuckoos at
Aber Cuawg, singing 'clamorously' to the sick man: 'there are that hear
them that will not hear them again!' the sound of the large wave
grating sullenly on the pebbles,--

The birds are clamorous; the strand is wet:
Clear is the sky; large the wave:
The heart is palsied with longing:

all these bright, wild outcries, in which wind and