I most eagerly hope that you will recreate in beauty the all but lost beauty of the old Cymric singers. There is a true originality in this, as in anything else. The green leaf, the grey wave, the mountain wind—after all, are they not murmurous in the old Celtic poets, whether Alban or Irish or Welsh: and to translate, and recreate anew, from these, is but to bring back into the world again a lost wandering beauty of hill-wind or green leaf or grey wave. There is, I take it, no one living who could interpret Davyth ap Gwilym and other old Welsh singers as you could do. I long to have the Green Book of ‘the Poet of the Leaves’ in English verse, and in English verse such as that into which you could transform it....
F. M.
The Welsh poet replied:
Newcastle-on-Tyne,
27th Dec., 1898.
Dear “Fiona Macleod,”
‘I believe I never wrote to thank you for your story in the Dome, which I read eventually in an old Welsh tower. It was the right place to read such a fantasy of the dark and bright blindness of the Celt: and I found it, if not of your very best, yet full of imaginative stimulus.
Not many weeks ago, in very different surroundings, Mr. Sharp read me a poem—two poems—of yours. So I feel that I have the sense, at least, of your continued journeys thro’ the divine and earthly regions of the Gael, and how life looks to you, and what colours it wears. What should we do were it not for that sense of the little group of simple and faithful souls, who love the clay of earth because heaven is wrapt in it, and stand by and support their lonely fellows in the struggle against the forces upon forces the world sends against them? I trust at some time it may be my great good fortune to see you and talk of these things, and hear more of your doings.
Ernest Rhys.
From the little rock-perched, sea-girt Pettycur Inn, my husband wrote to Mrs. Janvier: