The mist was then clearing (it was in July) and in a few moments was entirely gone. So marvellous a transformation scene, and so immense a prospect, I have never beheld since. For the first and only time in my life I saw from one spot almost the whole of North and Mid-Wales, a good part of Western England, and a glimpse of Scotland and Ireland. The vision faded all too quickly, but it was worth walking thirty-three or thirty-four miles, as I did that day, for even a briefer view than that.
Referring to Llyn Coblynau this interesting writer says—
Only from Glaslyn would the description in Aylwin of y Wyddfa standing out against the sky 'as narrow and as steep as the sides of an acorn' be correct, but from the north and north-west sides of Glaslyn this answers with quite curious exactness to the appearance of the mountain. We must suppose the action of the story to have taken place before the revival of the copper-mining industry on Snowdon.
With regard, however, to the question here raised, I can save myself all trouble by simply quoting the admirable remarks of Sion o Ddyli in the same number of Notes and Queries:—
None of us are very likely to succeed in placing this llyn, because the author of Aylwin, taking a privilege of romance often taken by Sir Walter Scott before him, probably changed the landmarks in idealising the scene and adapting it to his story. It may be, indeed, that the Welsh name given to the llyn in the book is merely a rough translation of the gipsies' name for it, the 'Knockers' being gnomes or goblins of the mine; hence 'Coblynau' equals goblins. If so, the name itself can give us no clue unless we are lucky enough to secure the last of the Welsh gipsies for a guide. In any case, the only point from which to explore Snowdon for the small llyn, or perhaps llyns (of which Llyn Coblynau is a kind of composite ideal picture), is no doubt, as E. W. has suggested, Capel Curig; and I imagine the actual scene lies about a mile south from Glaslyn, while it owes something at least of its colouring in the book to that strange lake. The 'Knockers,' it must be remembered, usually depend upon the existence of a mine near by, with old partly fallen mine-workings where the dropping of water or other subterranean noises produce the curious phenomenon which is turned to such imaginative account in the Snowdon chapters of Aylwin.
There is another question—a question of a very different kind—raised by several correspondents of Notes and Queries, upon which I should like to say a word—a question as to The Veiled Queen and the use therein of the phrase 'The Renascence of Wonder'—a phrase which has been said to 'express the artistic motif of the book.' The motif of the book, however, is one of emotion primarily, or it would not have been written.
There is yet another subject upon which I feel tempted to say a few words. D'Arcy in referring to Aylwin's conduct in regard to the cross says:—
You were simply doing what Hamlet would have done in such circumstances—what Macbeth would have done, and what he would have done who spoke to the human heart through their voices. All men, I believe, have Macbeth's instinct for making 'assurance doubly sure,' and I cannot imagine the man who, entangled as you were in a net of conflicting evidence—the evidence of the spiritual and the evidence of the natural world—would not, if the question were that of averting a curse from acting on a beloved mistress, have done as you did. That paralysis of Hamlet's will which followed when the evidence of two worlds hung in equipoise before him, no one can possibly understand better than I.
Several critics have asked me to explain these words. Of course, however, the question is much too big and much too important to discuss here. I will merely say that Shakespeare having decided in the case of 'Macbeth' to adopt the machinery he found in Holinslied, and in the case of 'Hamlet' the machinery he found in the old 'Hamlet,' seems to have set himself the task of realising the situation of a man oscillating between the evidence of two worlds, the physical and the spiritual—a man in each case unusually sagacious, and in each case endowed with the instinct for 'making assurance doubly sure'—the instinct which seems, from many passages in his dramas, to have been a special characteristic of the poet's own, such for instance as the words in Pericles:
For truth can never be confirm'd enough,
Though doubts did ever sleep.