The freezing hours away?
He has made a heaven and he fears it.
Once there came to him and to the farmhouse a ghost from the north. He was a tall, black-haired, white-faced man, with high curved brow, straight fleshy nose, perfect firm lips, and bony chin. Was he soldier or scholar or priest? asked one and another. His face was vigilant, of childlike freedom of expression, and yet of boundless mystery in repose. When he spoke, he had fire, dignity, rapidity, ease, fertility of ideas, and everything of the orator except that his speech was simple. He could move a Welsh multitude with politics as a wind moves the corn, yet he did so but once, because "it was a blackguard game." Distinguished from the rest only by his white tie, in the pulpit he looked a Loyola and was a Chrysostom; yet he stood there but once or twice, to bury a noble man. He was master of an English style that was like Newman's in simplicity, music, and weight, yet published but one pamphlet that was wrung from him by a needy cause in a week, and never did anything to disabuse a public that praised him for it. His handwriting, in any haste, was that of a leisured and proud monk. His deep voice had a kind of flame-like hum of passion in it; he always used it in the service of the beautiful and the true. I heard him laugh only once, and then the depth which he discovered for a moment disturbed me so that I distrusted all laughter afterwards: it was like a nymph emerging from a deep cave. In scorn, in ignorance, in mere contentedness, he never uttered a word. He is content to be the light and the rest of a few scholars and a hundred miners, and to be the faithful, unhonoured Levite of the mighty dead, of whom not one, or prince or bard, had a virtue which he has not, except it were a strong right arm and the will to make a war in which to use it for the service of the liberty and integrity of Wales, for these alone of mortal things he passionately loves.
MINER'S BRIDGE ON RIVER LLUGWY
Lastly, there is at the farmhouse still a memory of that poet, great discoverer of manuscripts and splendid human being—Iolo Morganwg—also herbalist, lover of liberty and of the Revolution in France, a mighty walker, who would ride in no man's coach, and having been given a horse, drove it before him for a long way, and complained that a horse was wearisome. He learned his alphabet from the tombstones which his father made. In his youth, in the middle of the eighteenth century, he thought of going to America to search for the Welsh colony left five hundred years before by Madoc ap Owen Gwynedd, whom Southey strove to sing. He was stone-mason, bookseller, land-surveyor and (in slave-owning days) seller of sugar "uncontaminated by human gore." Eighty years ago he was to be seen "on the highways and byways of Glamorgan—an elderly pedestrian of rather low stature, wearing his long grey hair flowing over his high coat-collar, which by constant antagonism had pushed up his hat brim into a quaint angle of elevation behind. His countenance was marked by a combination of quiet intelligence and quick sensitiveness; the features angular, the lines deep, and the grey eye benevolent but highly excitable. He was clad in rustic garb: the coat blue, with goodly brass buttons, and the nether integument good homely corduroy. He wore buckles in his shoes, and a pair of remarkably stout well-set legs were vouchers for the great peripatetic powers he was well known to possess. A pair of canvas wallets were slung over his shoulders, one depending in front, the other behind. These contained a change of linen and a few books and papers connected with his favourite pursuits" (the study and collection of old Welsh manuscriptions for the illustration of Welsh history). "He generally read as he walked, 'with spectacles on nose,' and a pencil in his hand serving him to make notes as they suggested themselves. A tall staff, which he grasped at about the level of his ear, completed his travelling equipment." And in this chair, they say, he spent a night, sleeping and reading alternately.
Outside, by the window, is the village idiot, with a smile like the sound of bells ascending from a city buried in the sea.