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happy to obtain, had crum the same colour as the crust, the crust the colour of English bakers' burnt raspings, the texture somewhat like half-masticated oats in a horse's rejected mouthful, the taste, what? something like cold heavy dumplings, with resinous sawdust. Gentlemen, it is indescribable: a happy second thought supplied us with very sweet oatmeal mixed with such milk, breakfast for a prince, if followed by-green tea two pints and a half, cream half a pint, misce. I well know how far beneath the dignity of a tourist is all this "pribble prabble" about our distresses: I hope, however, the slight glimpses of rude pastoral "life in Wales" which they afford us, may amuse readers as idle, peradventure, as we idle travellers.

The entrance to the valley of the Pyscottwr is one of true sylvan majesty. The mountains that, beyond, narrow into an Alpine ravine, here recede in noble uplands of grass, or grass-like sod, of the richest green, topped in some parts with forests, in other, with ivied cliffs, rising above that precipice of forests, lofty in the summer-blue, at this time gilded with the last of sunset. -At the moment of my writing this present, 18th day of June, 1831, I am sitting, at the mouth of our simple tent, formed partly by two large leaning rock-lumps, numbers of which strew this rarely trodden valley of several miles. The narrowness of it, I presume, renders it of little use as pasture ground; yet the hills do not start up so abruptly as to preclude a delicious turfy stripe on each side, enriched with clumps of hazel and witch elm and briars, now hanging their roses out for us and the "desert air," for utter solitude seemed to prevail there. I believe no eye saw our night fire but our own: we heard a sheep bleat rarely up on high, where enormous natural ruins of rock, literally topped over our heads, poised an end like some old tower's single bulk, left hanging in a ruin. The very dark olive of many of these masses, tints, produced partly by vegetation, partly by weather stains and faded moss, gives a sombre solemnity, quite akin to the effect produced by dusky antiquity of such decayed works of man's hand. Whitened bones of sheep, killed by falls or dogs, huge detached roots of old trees, stocks, and stubs, lay all about, impressing the idea of total seclusion from the footsteps of man; while the enormous tumbled down blocks of crag, that in parts filled the whole defile till the river, lost in its own bed, is only heard thundering down into gulfs of polished wave-worn stone, or seen but by the spray, looking whiter in its rise, from the blackness of lichens, that encrust many of the masses; all this carries the mind back to ideal primorval ruinous states of the world, the chaos itself.

My two boys were soon fast asleep in our semi tent, but the quiet grandeur of the scene, in a mild starry midnight, was too attractive to be soon exchanged for "death's twin brother, sleep." The ruddy gleam of the water tossing in its chaotic prison of

rock, as our fire gleamed across the valley, was picturesque; so was the black breadth of mountains that shut us in, now, by the duskiness of night, obscured into a uniformity resembling a mighty wall, over which the stars wavered; and now and then a disturbed kite, in the nest, or sitting on a nest, sent a low drowsy wail, just heard above the deep moan of the waters flow.

He who would enjoy a midsummer dawn, let him forthwith go to bed in a tent, (for its construction let him apply to a gipsy, or to me, Rural Doctor, of Brecknockshire,) pitched, any how, in the valley of the Pyscottwr, just where a fine break in the barrier heights allows the imprisoned eyes, just awake, to wander down the defiles of other mountains, and imagine (not see) in their solemn recesses, the beauties of the hundred nameless waterfalls that send such a roaring from so far off, to rouse him from or lull him to sleep, as the hour and mood may suit either enjoyment. I shall not balk his experiment, by attempting to describe the pleasures of such a waking, and finding the world we left (at thrusting ourself into our domicile,) dark, silent, and death-like, though still hushed as night, brilliant as noonday; cool, fragrant, musical with birds, and hung all with diamonds of dew, their tiny prisms flashing rainbow-beams at us wherever we turn our eyes, from every dog-rose garland, every tassel of woodbine flowers, every emerald leaf.

This hermit stream, Pyscottwr, at the mouth of the vale just described, unites itself to the Dethia, another embowered, embosomed, rocky river, traversing scenery equally wild and beautiful. A striking contrast affects the mind here, betwixt the sort of adorned, and sometimes dreadful magnificence the scenes present, and the undecorated, almost unclothed, meanness and lowliness of the "lords of creation" that inhabit them. We see sweeps of majestic greensward betwixt forests climbing the hills, rivers and rich pastures, and we look around for the noble mansion whose domains we have traversed; instead of such, peeping over its woods in some venerable park, we see but a hut of loose stones and vegetating thatch, its black peat stack its only wealth, and its lord, bare foot, bare legged, his tanned skin disgustingly visible through remnants of linen, torpid, with scarce wakened senses; in short, a being but one degree exalted above the savage; who derives nothing from all that lavishness of nature, beyond that dreary shelter from the winds and rains; perceives in all that beauty, nothing beautiful, unless it be the root or the seed, the potatoes or the barley, it returns for his yearly labour, to uphold (and barely uphold) a life prolonged for no other purpose than that eternal labour. If a few farm-houses present a few persons a little higher and happier in the scale of existence than the labourer, even their conditon, from the depressed state of the wool market, (the staple of the farmer here,) is not much nearer to happiness;

and they have to suffer, for a little less privation and hardship, a great deal more anxiety; they have to meet the landlord's, parson's, and tax gatherer's awful visages,-from those visitations the rock cabin and its tenant are exempt. These fine scenes induce melancholy; so we will proceed along the Dethia, through bowered lanes, beneath whole mountains, and hanging woods, full of birds, passing one cottage after another, till we reach the spot alluded to, en passant, yesterday, the conflux of the Tywi with the Dethia, reinforced by Pyscottwr. The sublime and the beautiful of scenery are here remarkably combined: we spread our breakfast, (this, however, is not the only sublime I allude to,) on one of a hundred little natural grassplots, which the encroachments of the river, in wet seasons, have left, on its recession, insulated along its rocky sides, where thickets, hanging trees, and smoothest sods intermingle, over-topped by abrupt rising hills, which at this spot bend round into a noble amphitheatre.

Deep polished excavations, forming huge natural cisterns of brilliant water, yawned all about in singular grotesqueness; the river plunging in its mid-channel down into a profound gulf: opposite, the whole stream of the river Tywi wandered and struggled, and leaped among oaks and jutting crags and falls, down the broad face of a whole lofty mountain, not one waterfall but many, coming down from heights hidden by a forest in air, as one might imagine it, with a thunder proportioned to the great descent. Cows lowed and grazed, and sheep whitened the narrow meadows above us; above them the yellow road was seen winding away up the valley we had traversed; on the steep, higher still, stood the one human dwelling in view,-white, clean, thatched, and half buried among trees that leaned all down the precipice it stands on. It is a farm, and yields every grace to the wild landscape that a husbandman's comfortable home can do. But the finest thing by way of contrast, beyond even a distant whole sky-climbing range of uniform forest, (part of the forest of Rescob,) which is greatly fine, is a whole enormous hill of all rock and earth, naked from sky to vale, and looking even a volcanic grandeur from the ferruginous nature of the soil that is seen crumbling, acted on by the air assuming a lurid red and purplish hue,-grand and terrific, quite inaccessible as it is, and of such fearful elevation. Thus standing a huge body of desolate sterility in itself, while all is pastoral Arcadian beauty round its base, it adds wonderfully to the beauty, as does that landscape to its horror.

Grave and silent, without an idea of being intrusive, four or five of the half clothed "natives" of this Salvator Rosa's paradise, came and seated themselves round us, to gaze at our fire, and odd shaped tea-kettle, and white breakfast cloth. None spoke, all stared, and when I strove to commence a gossip, they soon betook themselves each his own way, seemingly in the embarrassment of shyness. In

such a scene and morning, who could forget Herbert's song or hymn!

"Sweet day! so blue, so calm, so bright,
Soft bridal of the earth and sky;

Angels shall mourn thy fall to-night,
For thou must die!"

And so must man! thought I, and a man already far advanced into life's dull afternoon, ere long a vision of the "valley of death," of dry bones, of the skeleton-king's dry and bloodless shambles, the charnel, that most ancient Golgotha, where that "mighty hunter" on the pale horse hides the human wreck and ruin of two worlds full of once living beings from the sight of the living: such a vision, (I don't know what your ages may be,) is apt to peep at a middle-aged man from behind the greenest mountains, from under the shivering of the tenderest leaves; to scowl grim at him from the very depths of the blue sky, and frown a night of horror even from behind the glorious morning sun; a night

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Angels only, I sighed to myself, angels or some creatures blessedly exempt from this terrible penalty of death, which we must pay for having lived, ought to walk Wales under such a sky as this!

Perhaps it is because I neither fish, hunt, nor shoot, that this dread of death will take possession of my unoccupied mind, in the midst of such scenes and moments, when peace and sunshine, the summa bona of human felicity, make life dearer to us, and the idea of its eternal nightfall intolerable. Much as I like the prettiness of the idea, I never could subscribe to the wish of the milkmaid in Walton's Angler, that she "might die in the spring, to have store of flowers to stick about her windingsheet." Yet, with regard to mental resources, I cannot attach much value to the three above named, if it be not a misnomer to call them mental. Forming, however, as they do the almost exclusive refuge from ennui of my Welsh neighbours, I shall venture a few remarks on their pleasures and mine, that of enjoying nature for herself alone. I confess that, "de gustibus non disputandum," my delight of peeping at a summer sky, through a ceiling of leaves, as I lie along, hour after hour, may seem as senseless to a fox-hunter as his does to me: I have an ever-springing fount of joy within myself, in a certain keen relish for scenery, sunshine, and blue calm, which renders all other pleasures poor in comparison: I consider this taste merely as a taste, not a whit more to be boasted of than any other relish, for turtle or venison for instance; therefore disclaim, in limine, all confounding of my liking with positive taste, which may or may

NO. XIII.

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not accompany the taste for mountains and green fields. Yet I am proud of my resource, and what I would urge is, that most men might, by fostering their quiet sensibilities, supersede the necessity for crueller sports. Yes, gentlemen, carrying about with me this capacity for joy, pure of blood and wrong, while my brethren the country gentlemen are driven to seek theirs with noise and fury, the infernal outcries of the pack, the murderous gun, or the asinine patience of the angler's fixed eye and stupid stand; I compare myself (laugh who will,) to the Heaven-provided camel, who can traverse the sandy desert at his ease, having within a fount of living water to refresh him, rest where he will; and those my neighbours who cry out on the dead dullness of the country, (to them, indeed, a desert,) I resemble to Arabian steeds, or any other more externally gifted and vigorous animals, who yet must depend on that country for sources of refreshment, and therefore take up with any brackish pool or puddle they can discover in it, akin to the poor and dirty enjoyment of vermin-hunting, whether their haunt be in the air, the earth, or the water.

First, for shooting,-it commences in the very golden age of the seasons, when the farewell smile of summer is upon the earth, a sad solemn beauty of the beautiful dying, sleeping upon the yellow harvest fields and the ruddy orchards, inspiring a sort of whispering reverence, with regret for departing nature,-nature on her deathbed, when every day of golden blue assumes a mournful preciousness; then it is the sportsman bursts in with his rout to his play of blood and death! Out upon him! it is like the burst of burglars and murderers into the house of sleep, upon the sacred hour of nature's rest and misery's holiday of forgetfulness. Then in the calm pensiveness of the year's decline, when even the hard heart is softened, and a soft one will almost bleed for the death of a ladybird, then begins the campaign against those our friends of the thicket and the dingle, that sing us a song from their chamber of green leaves as they are going to bed, or hop around us for a supper of crumbs, as we take tea on some warm woodside, yellow with sunset and gemmed with wood-strawberries, peeping from out of the groundivy leaves and the moss. Good God! is it not enough that creatures die to clothe us, to feed us, to serve us, but they must also die, and die miserably, to make us sport?

Now for fishing: a naked savage of Terra del Fuego or elsewhere, standing hour after hour on the rushy margin of his dismal lake, wrapped in mist, or on the dead shore of the sea, to ensnare a fish for his salvation from a death of hunger,-such a being so occupied, may be a rational man, and his purpose is rational; but the excuse for such a miserable labour ceases with the necessity. When I look on a well-fed gentleman, standing middle-deep in the Wye, for hours, to catch a salmon, I cannot help thinking how my savage, if as well fed as he, would laugh to see his sad task

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