LETTER FROM AN AMATEUR GIPSY. To the Editors. GENTLEMEN, From my Tent in the Valley of the CAN any object in nature be more delightful than a mountainstream, combining the grandeur of the river with the beauty of the wild brook? such is Upper Towey, and such is also the higher course of almost every noted river in Wales, though neglected by tourists for that more expanded portion of its track which allows fashion to flutter on its surface, and violate the solitude of its banks: here, winding along unmown meadow sides, gurgle, gurgle, just loud enough to break the noonday silence of a valley; there, brawling louder among rock fragments in its shallowness, forming tiny islands of their green lumps nodded over by young fern plumes, and of the gnarled old roots of vanished trees, moss grown, and full of primroses presently sweeping dark and river-like, with breadth and depth for a pleasure boat, or even a yacht, (which God forbid ever should thrust its gaudy foppery there!) but bearing nothing at all, except a weed or waterlily, or little snowy floating island of foam, borne down from some cataract higher up, heard, and just heard to thunder at a distance, within a venerable mountain-wood, black, up a precipice. Such is the young river, sporting like infancy, all peace and all nature! to me far more attractive than the same stream matured into usefulness, subjugated into a river of burden, flowing on through smiling but insipid fertility, glittering with green and gilded prows and sunny sails, or degraded by the black and sluggish coal barge, that grim abomination of commerce, which scowling among cowslip banks and wooded cliffs, is like some fiendish inhabitant of the world without a sun, come begrimed with all its soot, (for we cannot believe that Satan burns charcoal for ever,) to steal, ugly and horrid, among the golden groves of the world of angels. I am aware, Gentlemen, this is a most Miltonic bounce for prose; from a wild brook, quite across Phlegethon, and up again above the earth: no matter. I was going to say that a whimsical fellow might run a "right merrie and conceited" parallel between the stages of a Welsh river, and the "ages" of our English Literature. The placid subdued stage just described, the theme of every tourist, that of the "stations" and "points" of view pointed out usque ad nauseam; the lodge of Chepstow and Piercefield, the Towey of Grongar hill and Golden grove; this is like the (misnamed) Augustan age, the Gallicised age of our poetry. But, give me the Elizabethan age, unsubdued to insipidity; grand, wild nature adorned; too similar, alas! in the neglect it experiences, to the lonely untrodden valley of the river, neglected for its less original though advanced and widened way. In both I see rugged force fighting all obstacles, one of language, the other of roots and rocks, tumbled down the precipices into its bed; but that rudeness very sweetly relieved by snatches of truly cerulean softness of beauty, whose utmost wildness transcends the utmost art of the other. There are the deep warm secret glens, all flowers and verdure, where one might fancy never foot or pettito had trod, till there came that hermit-lamb which has nibbled yonder little spot of rock turf into a grassplot fit for a king to spread his breakfast upon; never flown over till by that very kite, dim seen, low heard, which is sailing across from the white faced cliff on one side of the vale, to the wooded height and ivied rock-ruins on the other. A lover of nature, and our old dramatists, and Welsh vales, will not boggle at my simile, but recognise a certain affinity between those lovely wild dingles, blooming fresh, as it were, from the hand of God; and many a sweet and touching unexpected scene, the fine inspiration of god-like genius bursting on us out of surrounding wildness, in the works of Webster and Shirley, and Chapman, and, above all, Ford, Shakspearian Ford! One might easily pursue our parallel, follow the beauty of our stream of poetry up to where it begins to be hidden, then is quite lost in barbarous and uncouth wildness, till the very ground fails us, through the obscure grandeur of its remote course in Chaucer and Gower, quite up to the infancy of our language where all is sterile and flowerless, to the deserts of the age of Langland, and of Robert of Gloucester, on to the Anglo-Norman Saxon jargon, where we go floundering and uncertain of meaning, as of step on the tiptop of Pumlumon, by the very cradle of the Wye, brawling forth from its quaking peat bog, barren and horrid. Now my object is to introduce to your Saesonig readers their old poetical friend, the Towey of Dyer, under his new orthographical face of Tywi, playing among the fine companions of his infancy, to them unknown, probably,-Dethia and Pyscottur, and Camdwr; promising them a sketch of the dwellers thereby, to the whit as wild and singular, though not as beautiful, as the scenery round them. Beauty, if existing, indeed would be little visible for the effects of peat smoke on the "human faces divine," that peep through an eclipse of their own hearth's production, on the half-suffocated inquirer at the door. In Welsh mountain houses, be it known, the chimney and window exchange offices; the former, huge and cavern-like, lets in more light than the latter, while the lattice or peephole of broken windows emit the smoke that should find its way up the chimney. I said the natives are singular; to the proof-they go bare legged, bare footed; in fact, the younger folk, half-naked; tea and sugar are rarities and luxuries, little known to them; they are wholly ignorant of all tongues but the Welsh; and, lastly, they constitute a little population of considerable farmers and breeders of sheep, living within half a day's ride of spots familiar to and frequented by all followers of guide books and tours, not one of whom (I speak not of the native traveller) I dare swear would have believed that such a state of society could have been pointed to in Britain, in defiance of the "march of intellect" and tea, of the "schoolmaster" and the mail-coach driver. Myself and my two sons, "companions of my mountain joys," reached Abergwessyn, by sunset, "the wildest and most uninhabitable part of Brecknockshire," saith Theophilus Jones, in his history of the county. Here are two little churches close together, on the bank of the river Irvon, that silvers with its serpentine inosculations with the Gwessyn this secluded spot, buried among mountains so vast, yet so little varied, that the wide round of russet sheepwalk has the effect on the eye of a perpetual autumn. There is something peace-breathing and solemn in this singular contiguity of two churches, with their ruins of yews of fine antiquity, compensating with the grandeur of nature's architecture the meanness of man's, which in these lowly temples, the one to Saint David, (Llandewi,) the other to Michael the Archangel, (Llanvihangle,) is, in truth, mean enough. The Abergwessyn added to each of these names, signifies the conflux of the Gwessyn with the Irvon Aber always attaching to the junction of the tributary stream, never to the larger. Here we pondered over a brook and farm of odd name, Nant y Flaiddast, "the brook of the she-wolf," one of the Termini mentioned in an old charter of Rees ap Griffith to the monks of Strata Florida Abbey, in Cardiganshire. I should have said we reached this Ultiuma Thule, of the Brecknock historian, by a valley so delightful, so embosomed in grand mountains, so nobly wooded, watered, and sheltered, and its fine old mansion, (Llwynmadoc,) that Dr. Johnson might almost have taken it for the model of a happy valley, without addition, to accommodate his Rasselas. Next morning, commencing pedestrians, we crossed naked heights, sheepwalk or peat morass quaking under foot, varied here and there only by a dreary sort of waterfall, such as alone is found at that elevation,--a savage looking chasm of fractured stone without trees, down which a dingy water tumbles; and the whole softer country, deep down, presents its dim and distant richness through its gorge, informing the tiptoe traveller at what a height he has been wandering, and giving a frightful degree of dizzy elevation to the wild pinnacle he stands on. At last the Towey gleamed deep beneath us, and a fine birdeye view broke on us of its valley, or rather a wilderness of vallies, for we looked down on the junction of several rivers, each with its own wild vale ;-of these hereafter, when we shall have descended to them. At present our path went high above the Tywi, following its windings along a truly Alpine terrace road, keeping near the top of a vast declivity with wildly hanging trees, the riverbanks below, all pastures, spotted with a few white farms. At every turn of the valley and our mountain bank, a fresh crowd of romantic mountains presented themselves, or what seemed fresh ones, from the wholly new aspects they assumed, standing bold and defined from sky to valley, in their whole precipices of woody turf, or shaly stone, or ivied crags. Reached Ystrad Fin, (the "boundary of the vale,") an old seat now rebuilt into a modern farm here it was that Twm Sion Catti, the Robin Hood of South Wales, we are told, caught his reluctant mistress (the heiress of this mansion,) by the hand, as she extended it through the window during a tête-à-tête, and extorted a promise of marriage, under the alternative of having it cut off with his sword, and carried away in his pocket for a lovetoken. Just opposite is the noble conical mountain Carreg Tywi, wood clothed, from whose recesses come a roaring, revealing the fall of a whole river into the course of another far below; that is the dark wooded region where the Tywi itself tumbles down a precipice, not by one leap, but many, broad and obstructed by rocks, diffusing its foamy waters over the face of a whole rock;-by that we propose to breakfast tomorrow: today we beg the reader's company at our tent's mouth, pitched in a wild valley, quite a terra incognita of tourists, the vale of the river Pyscottwr: the evening was quite an Italian one, of this present glorious June. Be it known that we occasionally turn amateur gipsies, and bivouac sub cœlo, always travel armed with all means for fire-raising, (though quite unconnected with the fire-raisers of Kent;) a kettle for boiling extempore is also our companion: thus equipped, "the world is all before us where to choose our place of tea.' No sooner, however, had we pitched on a spot than one "fatal remembrance" dashed our hopes to the earth, the tea was exhausted, the sugar was departed! away we posted to a good farmhouse, we had passed, called Troedyrawr, or some such name. "The tea had been gone a week, the sugar also; farmers there very seldom used tea;" such was the reply of the mistress's sister, a very decent sensible woman, in the midst of a bare-foot family, supping on whey and potatoes. Tried another such farm, with the same result. "But there's a shop:" happy news! the good wife pointed up to near the top of a green mountain, where stood, or rather hung, a grey antique hut of stones, sod topped; "that's the shop!" Toiled up a slippery turf, mounted up above our destined object, to find footing across the head of a ravine or chasm, the depth of the whole hill. Midway across our path, a few inches broad, stood a young man, with so earnest yet vacant a stare, that we deemed him an idiot, for an eager curiosity that might have made him an immortal, like Newton, possibly, in other situations. "At least we're sure of it here," said we, in our ignorance: (Gentlemen, I cannot exist without tea, and to pass a night out of doors without that nectar for nerves, green tea, impossible!) A plague of mountain shops! Our wild-looking philosopher informed us that there was just no call for such things thereabouts; no, indeed! "the woman was come from Llandovery, but had brought no tea that week:" sorrowing, we retraced our steps; we were already tottering across the ravine and torrent, when the young man's voice recalled us. There stood a large family, male and female; women knitting, naked children shrinking up to them, and an aged man, in fine patriarchal simplicity, pulling up a certain dingy-body article of dress, out of that nameless other which human ingenuity has improved a fig leaf into, to enjoy the royal luxury of a scratch. Foremost stood the spokesman of the group; another young man, equally remarkable for a wild and squalid appearance; and the same nudite des pies: in each hand he held a little parcel, which he kept tossing while he told us, that seeing our distress, (God bless the charity of the Ancient Briton!) "the womankind" had bethought herself that she had brought a little tea from the market, and a good deal of sugar; but, would we buy it all? To buy the whole stock in trade of a grocer was a little startling. "How much is it?" "Here it is," said he, shewing in one hand tea, half an ounce, in the other, sugar, one pound! Encouraged by this, we grew extravagant in our desires, and hinted about bara, (bread,) our own growing near its end. "Oh, no, no!" that was out of the way, they never sold bread. But I was going to have said that, to an English Paul Pry observing us, it must have been a rather comic spectacle; the earnest gravity with which this treaty was carried on, the frequent hints of those in the rear to their orator, (gracefully still playing with the two bales of merchandize, as a juggler tosses his balls,) the object being to sell "the pound, the whole pound, and nothing but the pound." Next we ventured to llaetha (beg milk,) and departed with our wickerset bottles brimful of llaeth, of the best quality, such as would in London, after dilution with as much water, have formed excellent cream. Once more our cry was for bread; another shepherd-farmer's door was beset by us: a broad low white dwelling, with huge thickness of thatch, bristling down to the height of a very short man's head; the fold, or farm-yard, native rock starting through scanty sod. Bara haidd (barley bread,) we obtained, it was in vain to hope any other kind. By bread, the Saxon reader will be apt to picture to himself a certain delicious mass, white as milk, soft as sponge, porous as a honey-comb. Now the bread we were so |