gazes,
   Where fell the last hero who fought for his sake;
The breezes are moaning, the earth is complaining,
   That the heart of old Cymru is feeble and weak.
’Tis aliens only their pilgrimage make
   Where low lies our prince by the side of his glaive.
Thank God for the tears which are falling from heaven,
   And the grass that grows green by the edge of the grave.

The Strand of Rhuddlan.

Frowned the dark heavens on the cause of the righteous,
   Bondage has swept our free warriors away,
Vain were our prayers as our dreams had been baseless,
   Sword of the foeman has carried the day.
Hid be thy strand ’neath the snows everlasting,
   Frozen the waters that over thee break!
Come to defend, O thou God of all mercies,
   Cause of the righteous and home of the weak.

Slain is our leader, and he who has slain him,
   Prince of the foemen, will reign in his stead.
Fallen our harp with the fall of Caradoc,
   Ay! let it fall as he fell and lay dead!
Yet can I look on the field of the slaughter,
   God was not mocked, nor was freedom denied.
Better than that ’twas to die—there on Rhuddlan
   Better to sink in the free flowing tide.

The Steed of Dapple Grey.

Caradoc calls his warriors,
   And loud the bugles blow;
On rushed the brave Silurians,
   And fell beneath the foe.
Back shrank his men retreating,
   But on her steed of dapple grey
   There rides the stately queen that way
Her spouse, Caradoc, meeting.

There’s tumult in the dingle,
   As sinks the sun o’erhead;
And many a stalwart hero
   Lies for his country dead.
One host the waters cover,
   But on her steed of dapple grey
   There rides the stately queen that day
To seek her royal lover.

Then saw the Romans only
   A steed of dapple grey;
But saw the Britons riding
   Their stately queen that way.
The bugles sound the rally!
   The Britons backward turn—to fight,
   The Romans backward reel—in flight,
Before that last grim sally.

A Lullaby.

   Sleep, sleep, sleep!
All nature now is steeping
Her sons in sleep,—their eyelids close,
All living things in sweet repose
   Are sleeping, sleeping.

   Sleep, baby, sleep!
Peace o’er thee watch be keeping,
If from my bosom thou art torn,
Low in the grave I’ll lie forlorn,
   Sleeping, ah, sleeping.

ISLWYN.

William Thomas was born April 3, 1832, and very early showed signs of poetic talent.  He published a volume of poems, ‘Caniadau Islwyn’ (Messrs. Hughes & Son, Wrexham), about 1867, some of the finest pieces in which, including “Thought” and “The Vision and Faculty Divine,” are extracted from a long poem “The Storm,” which has never yet been published.  A complete edition of his works is now in the press.  He died Nov. 20, 1878.

Night.

Come, Night, with all thy train
Of witnesses.  I love
The stars’ deep eloquence,
That with the morning hours
Grows mute again.
Thy stillness cries to human sense,
“There is a God above,
And worlds more fair than ours.”
The day is night which hides the stars from sight!
Our night for day is given
To make more plain the path to heaven.

It is the Sun
That at its rising makes the infidel,
And all day long the world alone
Its tale can tell.
Oh welcome, Night, that bid’st the world be still,
That through the stars eternity may speak.
Too early, Dawn, too early dost thou wake:
Too early climbest up the Eastern hill:
Too early! stay: so quiet is the Night,
And in her pensive breeze such sympathy,
She shows us suns that suffer no eclipse,
O’er which the grave’s dark shadow ne’er can lie.
Nay! come not yet, O Dawn: thy laughing lips,
Thy wanton glance, and frolic songs of glee,
The convocation of those holier spheres profane,
And when night vanishes, heaven is hid again.

Come, balmy Night!  O peaceful hours,
When on its axis sleeps the untiring wheel,
And from this loud-voiced world of ours
No taint of earth can on the breezes steal.

The weary sailor, when time’s tempests rage,
Joys when he sees, on the far shores of heaven,
The fiery line of stars, as beacons given
To guide him to the eternal anchorage.

The Vision and the Faculty Divine.

   When it will, it comes,
   Like the rain or the bow
   Or the nightingale’s lay
   By the lake below:
As free from restraint as the seraph that roams
O’er the ebbing waves of the dying day,
When the reddening west, ’twixt the sun and the sea,
Seems to open the door of eternity.

   When it will, it comes,
   Like the stars that are driven
   O’er the cloudwrack riven.
When it will—to the world it owes no debt,
No times, no seasons for it are set.
When it will—like all that belongs to heaven.

   Not so the sea
That hath its laws and rules and door:
   Whose ebb and whose flow
In the ears of men beat evermore,
   Like time’s great pendulum to and fro.
And the time of whose visits is known long before
As it rolls to the moment from shore to shore.

   Not so the sun,
   Time’s fountain and head,
Whose shadows to hours and minutes creep,
As into their fold the gathering sheep.
The Alps, in their garb of eternal snow—
So far from the world they grow white with dread—
   The moment know
When from the East’s ever darkening sea
He will rise—the image of Deity.
And the birds, the same moment awaking, blow
The world’s great trumpet that men may know
   That night hath fled,
And day is risen again from the dead.

   Like the rainbow it comes—
As the sign of the covenant made long ago
’Twixt Godhood and thought, when, abating its flow,
The sea of eternity brought into sight
Time’s far distant mountains, and safe on their height
There rested, by God to humanity brought,
The Ark of eternal, immutable Thought!

Thought.

We are not certain that the mighty soul
Doth err, when far above the narrow groove
In which man walks from childhood to the grave
It rises, murmuring things unutterable,
And spurns as lies the outward forms of sense,
And, like a shooting star, enfranchised seeks
The spaces of eternity.

      Hath not
The soul a hidden story of its own,
A tide of mysteries breaking on a far
And distant shore, where memory was lost
Amid the mighty ruins of a world
Or worlds now vanished?

      Are the stars o’erhead
Things as divine and glorious as poesy
Is wont to sing?  Is’t not some power in us,
Some memory of a yet diviner world
And things illumined by the light of God
That dowers the stars with beauty, gives them strength
And grandeur?  ’Tis in us the stars have being,
And poesy’s self is but the memory
Of things that have been or the seer’s glance
At things that shall be—a future and a past
Both greater than the present.

      Who hath not
Within him felt some long forgotten world
Sweep through the corner of his former self,
Or touch some jutting peak of memory?
Or can we prove a poet’s imaginings
Are not the remnants of a higher life,
A thousand times more glorious, lying hid
Within the deepest sea of his great soul,
Till comes the all-searching breath of poesy
To bid them rise?  Oh hail, all hail the hour
When God