battle'; that is how the Welsh poet tells you what he had to sing about.
And he tells you, in his definite way, more than that; he tells you: 'I
have been where the warriors were slain, from the East to the North, and
from the East to the South: I am alive, they are in their graves!' It is
human emotion reduced to its elements; that instinct of life and death,
of the mystery of all that is tangible in the world, of its personal
meaning, to one man after another, age after age, which in every age
becomes more difficult to feel simply, more difficult to say simply. 'I
am alive, they are in their graves!' and nothing remains to be said in
the face of that immense problem. Well, the Welsh poet leaves you with
his thought, and that simple emphasis of his seems to us now so large
and remote and impressive, just because it was once so passionately
felt, and set down as it was felt. And so with his sense for nature,
with that which seems like style in him; it is a wonderful way of
trusting instinct, of trusting the approaches of natural things. He
says, quite simply: 'I was told by a sea-gull that had come a great
way,' as a child would tell you now. And when he tells you that 'Cynon
rushed forward with the green dawn,' it is not what we call a figure of
speech: it is his sensitive, literal way of seeing things. More
definite, more concrete, closer to the earth and to instinctive emotion
than most other poets, the Welsh poet might have said of himself, in
another sense than that in which he said it of Alexander: 'What he
desired in his mind he had from the world.'

1898.

* * * * *

Printed in Great Britain by

T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the University Press,
Edinburgh

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