She is dead, and these things come not again.
DISTANT VIEW OF BETTWS-Y-COED
Azariah John Pugh
One of the most inspiriting of our fire-siders at the farmhouse is a young schoolmaster named Azariah John Pugh, and called, in the Welsh fashion, almost invariably, Azariah John.
He is mainly English and partly Spanish; he was born in England, but having a Welsh name, he boasts much of his country, as he has elected to call Wales. But in truth he belongs to no time or place. He cares nothing for the house he lives in, for the village, or for any place he ever saw. Yet are we never tired of hearing his rich sentiments about them all. If only he be far away from it, there is no place known to him which he will not magnify with words which others do not easily use even for their true loves. Probably he would like to like them; but that very liking seems to be due to his feverish wide reading in books that are full of sentiments he admires and would borrow, if he could. Thus, of old cities, rivers flowing past famous places, mountains of beauty or story, the white cliffs of the south, the whin-red moorland of Wales, old gardens, solemn woods, all solitudes, fading races, sunsets, fallen greatness in men and things, old books, old beer, poverty, childhood ... of all these he will talk as if he had discovered them to the world, though it may be doubted whether he knows them at all. Yet is he a magnificent echo of the genuine lovers of these things, and he is so sorrowfully anxious to be believed that to some of us he has seemed to be the true heir, though defrauded of his inheritance, of all beauty and all antiquity. He is for ever speaking of "remembering afresh and with pleasure ancient matters," though he knows that even he cannot remember them with pleasure, and that no experienced man ever does so. He is so young that he has nothing to forget. But in his own esteem he is old now, and shakes his head over the light-heartedness of old men, saying, "If they were as old as I am——"
He speaks so suavely that the plain man wonders that he has never felt as deeply himself. Before his patriotism, the patriot is abashed. The lover of the quiet life, in his presence, is persuaded that himself can hardly be said to love it. No lover repeats more fondly—
THE OLD BRIDGE, BETTWS-Y-COED
And I would send tales of forgotten love