And ye whose habitations Our births, our wars, our wooings; Relief doth beg relief. By the vervain and lunary, By the dreadful misletoe Draw near, draw near, draw near. Help us beset with danger, And earth conspire their slaughter. We'll praise then your great power White lambs for suck still crying, By the vervain, &c. INVOCATION OF THE SAME TO THE MOON. Thou Queen of Heaven, commandress of the deep, A lamp dispelling irksome night; the source. Contract both night and winter in a storm, So may'st thou shun the Dragon's head and tail! FUNERAL SPEECH OVER NENNIUS DEAD. Then had'st thou lived, great Nennius, and out-lived Never did worthy act, a statelier part,— Nor durst pale Death approach with cypress sad, ANDROGEUS OFFERS TO RESIGN THE CROWN OF BRITAIN TO HIS YOUNGER And. I know their hatred just; and here resigu All my birth-right to thee, my second self. I must forsake my country's sight, and seek To be raised up by his now rising wheel. Them. O do not so, dear brother! sa to part, Were to divide one individual soul. * * * * * For my sake stay at home. Why will you fly? For trees transplanted do more goodly grow. * Them. And I'll count men but stocks, when they do so. The people whom he had offended by siding with the invaders. *+ + Milton has told this story of the Brothers in his History, after Geoffrey of Monmouth; and it is the subject of Mr. Wordsworth's noble poein of Artegal and Elidure. If we could believe in such a process as anti-burlesque, one might imagine that this last-named author bad elevated his well-known passage of the mounain's echoing back the lady's voice, in the poem to Joanna, from a perusal of the exquisite bombast in another passage of this same old play, where Mars is invoked in the following strains: Burst Janus' prison, Roar as thou didst et Troy, drown Stentor's voice TRANSLATION FROM MILTON INTO WELSH. We are going to do a thing very common with critics we are about to speak of a work we do not understand. What is not se common however, we are not going to condemn it. On the contrary, the evident spirit under which it is written, gives it a very advantageous character in our opinion; and we shall proceed to shew those eminent and dissatisfied persons, how possible it is by the help of a little goodhumour and modesty to be pleased instead of provoked, and to enjoy one's imagination instead of resenting one's ignorance. The reader is aware perhaps, that there is a kind of Poetical Order existing among our Welsh brethren, the object of which is to keep up the genius as well as remembrance of their ancient Bards. The members look upon themselves, in love at least, as their successors; take the same title of Bards; distribute harps as prizes; and endeavour to catch the reflection of their old fire on the same mountains. Nor is this second-hand inspiration, we dare say, without the occasional production of something fine. In a populous modern city, with its sophistications, such an establishment might be regarded as a mere game at antiques. But in persons of simplicity of life and earnestness of intention, especially in solitudes peopled with grand human recollec tions, it is difficult to love any thing fervently, and never speak of it in a worthy manner. We have scen poems in the English language written by Welshmen of this character, which were as good as some of the English productions of Burns; and the inference is, that in their own language, and on the subject of their own affections, they have not always produced poetry unworthy of ranking with his Scotch. Even upon subjects of mere antiquity, the inspiration above-mentioned may act upon them as that of the great poets of Greece and Italy has acted upon their own. Great times and men may literally be said never to die in point of effect. Their touch reaches us from afar. Their eye is upon us out of the clouds of time. We feel their memory in our ears, like the tremble of an eternal song. If their own works help to divert us from the more natural soil out of which they drew the flowers and fountains of their immortality, they serve to create a new stratum of fertility, not so fine indeed as the other, but still fine and abundant, and full of a second vitality. Death itself helps to beautify them. We walk among their memories, as we do among the leaves of autumn, or the ruins of great places; and supply the want of present perfection with the love of that which is past. In our youth, we met with one of the Modern Welsh Bards, who had all the character we speak of. He was a man of primæval simplicity of manners; that is to say, one who without any of the conven As another instance of the same sort of stuff not unfrequently to be found in this most unequal of dramas, a lover apostrophises the poison by which his lady died, with this elegant curse May toads, Dragons, and mandrakes, be thy gally-pots! tional substitutes for the humanities of intercourse, possessed that natural politeness of benignity, which is so instantly felt to be their vital spirit. He had the true Welsh face improved by information, hair and eyes black as a raven, and an expression of great candour and good nature. If we remember rightly, we gathered from his conversation, that he had risen, by dint of his love of letters, and much to the credit of those who noticed him, from an humble origin; which origin he neither affected to hide nor to boast of. He occasionally came up to London; took his meals with the best society among his countrymen or at his own hermit-like table; and hired an humble lodging near the Museum, where it was his delight to go and study Welsh antiquities. Thus if he came to London, he brought his country with him; found his bards and his very quiet about him, wherever he pleased, in the shape of books; and in default of his goats and mountains, could get among animals and things which perhaps he loved as well, and thought almost as real, the dragons and golden fields of Cambrian heraldry. Among other advantages of the remoteness and romantic nature of the sphere in which he grew up, it had kept him free from the small pedantry and self-sufficiency so often observable in the leading wits of country towns and minor cities; who think their own amount of knowledge the sum of all that is accomplished, and have a particular fancy for setting Londoners in the right. He had the humanity to think well of what he did not know. He loved his country's music and its poets, and in our fondness for an air on the piano-forte and an ode of Horace was pleased to discover something which he thought worthy both of his sympathy and his respect. [The Editor slowly recovering his health, is obliged to postpone the remainder of this article to next week.] Printed and published by JOSEPH Appleyard, No. 19, Catherine-street, Strand. Price 2d. And sold also by A. GLIDDON, Importer of Snuffs, No. 31, Tavistockstreet, Covent-garden. Orders received at the above places, and by all Booksellers and Newsmen. THE INDICATOR. There he arriving round about doth flie, SPENSER. No. LXVII.-WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 17th, 1821. TRANSLATION OF MILTON INTO WELSH. THIS pleasant Cambro-Briton, of whom we were speaking, once took us to see a countryman of his, whose taste in urbanities and antiquities resembled his own. He lived in a small quiet house near the fields; and we found him up to the eyes in good-humour, books, and a Welsh harp. If we are not much mistaken, this is the author of the Welsh Milton. There is something very beautiful to us to see the whole souls of men yearning in this manner towards their native country, when its power has long ceased to exist. They have all the merit of adhering to a great friend in adversity; and yet the friend is perhaps greater thau ever he was, and can reward them more. The ancient Britons had in them the seeds of a great nation, even in our modern sense of the word. They had courage; they had reflection; they had imagination. When driven from their larger possessions by the mere power which the world then adored, they soon found out the two great secrets of adversity,-that of softening reality with romance, and of turning experience to reformation. They possessed, in an extraordinary degree, the spirit of legislative improvement. Power at last made a vassal of their prince. There were writers in those times; harpers and bards, who made the instinct of that brute faculty turn cruel out of fear. But there were no presses to let all the world know what the writers thought, and to give intellectual power its fair chances with brute. They bequeathed to their countrymen however the glory of their memories. They, and time together, have consecrated their native hills, so as they were never before consecrated. Existing, in a manner, no longer as a thing of the common world, the country took an elevation nearer heaven. It lifted up its head in the light of love VOL. II. |