The Marquis de Moschati expressed himself to us, as experiencing excitement like intoxication when he sat himself to compose, and threw his whole soul into his subject. It commenced with irregular and laborious breathing, excessive palpitations, vertigo, tinnitus aurium,—the perception of objects being lost. Then came romantic fancies, like the visions of opium, “thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” At the conclusion was felt excessive exhaustion, and a state of mild catalepsy ensued for five or six days together. This excited talent, therefore, is an evanescent madness.
Cast. Another fling at poesy. Were I an improvisatrice, you would not so libel my inspiration. “Listen, lords and lady gay.” In the summer of 18—, after the Eisteddfod at Cardiff, we wandered over the hills to Caerphilly, the gigantic towers of Owain Glyndwr.
As I lay under the celebrated Hanging Tower, which is projecting eleven feet beyond its base, I reflected on the strange circumstance of the arrest of so gigantic a mass in its progress to prostration. “What,” I exclaimed, “is the power by which it is suspended?” My imagination heightened my reverie, and placed before me the image of the Destroyer, with his emblematic scythe and glass, and he answered me thus: —
“Half-dreaming mortal, listen! It is I,
Time, the destroyer, whose gigantic arm
Lifted this pond’rous ruin from its base.
Why hangs it thus, arrested in its course,
In bold defiance of attraction’s law?
Why, like its once proud lord, renown’d Glyndwr,
Sinks not its mouldering grandeur to the ground?