Beautiful Wales

by Edward Thomas

I

All the morning I had walked among the mountains, and snow had fallen; but gradually I descended, and found a hawthorn standing all white and alone; and, at first, the delicacy of the country had an air of unreality, as if it were but a fancy provoked by the grim, steep, cold heights. Nor, at first, were the small farmhouses quite so real as the crags I remembered. As I approached them, I seemed to be revisiting lands that belonged to a fictitious golden past; but as I came up to them, I was not undeceived, as I should have expected to be. How sweet and grave were the young larches! The brooks were not running as I had heard them up among the hills, but as brooks would run if I read of them at home and at ease in the verses of some tender poet, or as they will when I remember them many years hence. The sound of the world was heard only as the laughter of youthful voices by the trout pools, or again as the pealing of bells that presently grew and swelled and bubbled until the valley in which they pealed overflowed with the sound, and the moment of their ceasing was not marked. So at last I gave up some of the pleasure of sight and hearing and smell under the influence of those very senses. For a fancy came of a kind that is not easily avoided when spring and our readiness for it come together. And the fancy was that I was coming into a land whither had fled the transient desirable things of childhood and early youth. Especially was it the land to which had fled the acquaintances of that time, who were known, perhaps, only for one day—one spring—with whom intimacy began to flower, and then death or some less perfect destroyer intervened and "slit the thin-spun life" and gave an unwithered rose into our keeping—the memory of a laugh, a revelation, a catch of fish. We did not know them long enough to have doubts, self-questionings, the egotistical indulgences in letters and conversations of which we sometimes drink so deep that we taste the lees and know futility. Or they passed away as childish games do: we made an appointment and never kept it, and so we never knuckled the marble or saw the child again. We knew them once, golden-haired, and with laughter which no sigh followed, with clear voices in anger or love. These grow not old! And with them are some of those who were once as they, the friends who were once acquaintances: for who does not pleasantly (or bitterly) remember the first fresh moments when, like a first glass, our friends, with all their best qualities perhaps unknown, were tasted carelessly, the palate quite unsoiled and in no need of the olives of charity; or the moments when, with tastes and aims not yet mutually discovered, we were yet dimly conscious of the end, seeing the whole future under vague light? Some of these we can—and I did—recall as if the happy voices had not died, but had simply made way for harsher or sadder tones, and had fled here to keep an immortality. I heard them on the fresh warm air. And with them hovered those I saw but once—in a crowd, at a wayside inn—and desired; and at my evening inn some empty chairs were not wholly in vain. Thus did the shadow of the mountain fall far over the soft lands below.

VALLE CRUCIS ABBEY

II

All sign of snow had left the hills, when long before sunrise, but not before the east had begun to grow serious with thoughts of dawn, I came upon a rough meadow, where a solitary thorn was white with flower—or of that colour which white is in the dusk. It reminded me of snow, but prettily defying the mountains, it meant all May. And it happened that the day then being born was perfect May. The east opened, and the close-packed, dwarfed hills were driven out of it like sheep, into the gradual light. From that moment until the day passed in a drift of purple and dim cloud, all things were marvellously clear. In the hedges, on the rough meadows, and in the steep wastes under the cliffs, there were hundreds of hawthorns flowering, and yet they were not hundreds, but one and one and one.... They were as a crowd of which we know all the faces, and therefore no crowd at all; and one by one these were to be saluted. Not only the white thorns, but the oaks in the large fields, and even the ashes and alders by the brooks were each distinct. If I had raised my head, I should have seen, indeed, that the mountains were in haze, and that what I had just passed was in haze. But I never saw, or wished to see, for more than a quarter of a mile, and within that distance all things were clear and separate, like books which oneself has handled and known, every one. Even the daffodils under a hazel hedge never became a patch. The women, at gateways or among the cows, stood out like one or two statues in a large vacant hall. One field had in it twelve isolated oak trees, and that they were twelve I saw clearly, and wondered and admired, and never dreamed of thinking of them as just a number of oaks. One by one the footpaths, to left or right, went up to one of the oaks or thorns, and, untrodden, disappeared suddenly. And I could not but recall the lovely clear pictures in old Welsh poetry and story which had on winter nights reminded me of May. And chiefly this, from the Mabinogion, was in my mind.

VIEW OF LLANGOLLEN

"'I was,' said Kynon, 'the only son of my mother and father, and I was exceedingly aspiring, and my daring was very great. I thought there was no enterprise in the world too mighty for me, and after I had achieved all the adventures that were in my own country, I equipped myself and set forth through deserts and distant regions. And at length it chanced that I came to the fairest valley in the world, wherein were trees of equal growth; and a river ran through the valley, and a path was by the side of the river. And I followed the path until mid-day, and continued my journey along the remainder of the valley until the evening; and at the extremity of an plai I came to a large and lustrous castle, at the foot of which was a torrent. And I approached the castle, and there I beheld two youths with yellow curling hair, each with a frontlet of gold upon his head, and clad in a garment of yellow satin, and they had gold clasps upon their insteps. In the hand of each of them was an ivory bow, strung with the sinews of the stag; and their arrows had shafts of the bone of the whale, and were winged with peacock's feathers; the shafts also had golden heads. And they had daggers with blades of gold, and with hilts of the bone of the whale. And they were shooting their daggers.