among her
mountains, satisfied with an interesting but exceedingly narrow
little culture of her own. You might almost say that from the
time the Romans left Britain there was no channel through which
ideas might flow in to her; and this idea, especially, was
hardly in Europe to flow in. And yet this idea has curiously
persisted in Wales, as a tradition among the unlettered, even to
our own day. Dr. Evans-Wentz, of Berkeley, Oxford, and Rennes
Universities, in this present twentieth century, found old people
among the peasantry who knew something about it, had heard of it
from their elders; there was nothing new or unfamiliar about it
to them; and this though nearly all Welsh folklore, even belief
in the fairies, almost suffered extinction during the Religious
Revivals of the eighteenth century and since. They say the
chapels frightened the fairies out of Wales; it is not quite
true; but you can understand how wave after wave of fervid
Calvinism would have dealt with a tradition like that of
Reincarnation. And yet echoes of it linger, and Dr. Wentz found
them. I myself remember hearing of a servant-girl from the
mountains to whom her mistress (from whom I heard it) introduced
the subject. The girl expressed no surprise whatever: indeed to
goodness she shouldn' wonder, so there; her father was a druid,
miss, indeed and had told her about it when she was a child.

We have collateral evidence,--in Nennius, I believe,--for the
existence of several famed poets among the Welsh at that time;
and Tallesin' is one of the names mentioned. Seventy-seven poems
come down ascribed to him: I quoted some lines from one of them;
here now are some line from another. The child Taliesin is
discovered in the court of Maelgwr Gwynedd, where he has
confounded the bards with his magic; and is called forth to
explain himself. He does so in the following verses:

Primary Chief Bard am I to Elphin,
And my original country is the Region of the Summer Stars;
Idno and Heinin called me Merddin;
At length every being shall call me Taliesin.

I was with my Lord in the highest sphere
When Lucifer fell into the depths of hell;
I have borne a banner before Alexander;
I know the names of the stars from north to south.

I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain;
I was in the Court of Don (the Milky Way) before the birth
of Gwydion;
I was on the high cross of the merciful Son of