The mountainous heath, the dead prospect, the ruinous rocks, the dingy pools of peat water, the dangerous quagmire's brown swamp, the broad flags whistling in the wind, the disturbed kites and night ravens screaming, the thunder of cataracts swelling the roar of winds, and the storm-fog magnifying and confusing all objects; all these probably conduced to the impression on his mind of those terrible pictures which that mind further distorted, as a broken mirror or ruffling lake does all objects. all "Aye," said he, "you may well crowd round me and fix your eyes on me. Never saw living man before what I have seen, and lived to tell it! a return from the mouth of hell! Nid eir i annwn ond unwaith! ('there is but one journey to hell,') the proverb says; then I may die easy, I'm safe, I'm safe! I'll tell you how it was. Death took me on his pale horse, oh the corpse-like monster! to that very mountain where Satan carried him whom a wretch, a childmurderer like me, must never more name! but that mountain was the roof of hell! I swear it was; and oh! days, weeks, months without a sun, he left me there chin deep, every moment sinking, the very scum and filth of the brimstone lake up to my lips; the least struggle would have sunk me below, and I should have breathed fire, eternal fire, instead of air, that instant if I had stirred! what could I do? when I called on Christ, a poor pale spectre boy, beautiful but ghastly, came and broke my heart by a look, and was gone! I could hear the horrid uproar of the souls and fiends, and storms, and sea of fire, beneath me, like ten thousand shipwrecks, with all their shrieks and death-cries; yet I was alone! alone! for the curse alone!' was on my heart, and therefore was I fixed apart even from the accursed, in a lonely thundering hell! a hell, the very Annwn*, in the likeness of a midnight fen, wide as the earth, dead, as they say its poles are, bleak and horrible with winter, beaten by hail, curtained with black night." I here throw together whatever images struck me forcibly in his wild outpourings. Of course these suffered various interruptions, but this is the substance of them. I treasure up the expressions of such lost cut-off children of the human family, as a sort of terrible inspiration. The mad are poets of the first order, (perhaps the true poet of sanity, in the melancholic intensity of that character, is scarcely less a cut-off, a disowned, a self-doomed member of that family ;) the furies, a poet might say, are to them as muses. He continued: • Annwn: the bottomless pit, or generally, the world to come. "Said I that I was alone? all that's monstrous and fatal to see; all that drives me melancholy mad but to hear; all prodigies in the sky, and earth, and under the earth, what I've read and heard of and never believed before, all were round me! all too true, too true! there I heard the Cwn Annwn*, Cwn Wybr, what do you call them? the dogs of the sky, the devils in shape of hunting dogs, which you know fill all the vault of heaven with their crying after a soul just loosing from the flesh, eager as our dogs, aye wolfdogs, ready to be let slip, can be, after the prey, the bloodhounds of passing souls! I saw the rampant fire of each, though I could not see them; that fire which every one goes trailing with him, like a chain, down heaven's steep road to hell; horrid sight! horrid sound! they passed and their yellings died away; and whose soul they caught, for I heard them growl cruelly over some one, I know not; God forbid I should ever know; I fear it was a woman's! 'twas not yours my cherub boy! no! that lies in God's bosom, as your babybody did in mine awhile; safe, safe, where I shall never come! "But oh! what my unhappy eyes saw round me on the earth, by the blue light, (such as the ghosts send dim before them when close upon us,) the light those fires shot down as they crossed, like jostling comet! the black few, that ceiling of hollow hell! swarmed with the Gwyllion and the Ellylon+, those pigmies the boldest warrior alive would faint but to look upon! goggle eyes in rolling heads without bodies, that lay by thousands on the ground, that came on the air close to my face by ten thousands! thick as mites, one after another, and a great bloody tear hung in every eye, while it looked into mine as it would flash to my brain. "But if I should tell you how I saw what no human eye has seen, the frightful deformed fathers of the Ellylon? you know what we hear o' winter nights round our good peat fires, about them; little I dreamed to ever more than hear of 'em! I shudder, shudder now to remember it, shiver to my • Cwn Annwn, "dogs of hell," also called Cwn Wybr, "dogs of the sky," are heard hunting, invisible in the upper regions of the air when a soul is parting from the body. They are always attended with fire in some shape: Dante himself might have caught a hint to horrify his horrible, from these Welsh superstitions, had he visited our isle. + Gwyllion and Ellylon, plurals of Gwyll and Ellyl. The latter corresponds to our Elf. The Hebrew Elilim is perhaps the origin of Ellylon. It bears the same signification. The Gwyllion are mentioned by Merddin and Taliessin. heart's blood! yes, I saw them creeping from out of their jagged clefts of rock, their hiding holes with toads and adders, of the rock-rent left by old earthquakes, from the dry water-courses, in their polished marbled black or grey; these creatures that grow as worms out of a carcase, out of the mere dust of the earth, and the foul damps there, from worms into dwarfs, from dwarfs into devils in man's shape, but such a shape! as if he who gave God's fine world to sin and death, and bears off in triumph to the pit more souls than the Almighty saves to people his heaven, had tried to deform bodies as he does souls, and made these imp men, in mockery of his Maker! yes, when all was over and I stood childless in my misery, all air and all its apparitions were in uproar: oh why, why not one vouchsafed in mercy;" and there the unhappy man wept and seemed half restored to clear recollection; "why, when my dear boy's soul was on the wing, did no omen put wings to my speed, to reach him before it flew, to have whispered but once in his dull, dull ear, mine own!' I heard no dogs of the sky then, no noises rung in the thick air like the hammering on a coffin lid; no dismal Cyhiraeth* moaned in my ear to warn me of my doom; no Canwyll Corph crept, like will-o'-the-wisp in our fogge dingie, from my boy's chamber to the burial ground, when I looked down my house from the top; oh, if but a real jacko'-lantern had flitted along the brook, I might have fancied it a corpse candle, and rushed down headlong, aye, rapid as that very flying of his innocent soul! have been in time to meet it on his lips, to kiss him once more alive; then I had been happy!" After a long pause of exhaustion he began to describe what seemed no more than the rock scenery of that lofty desert, shewn to him by faint moonlight overhung by storm. "All the tombs, and dead men's effigies, and crumbled sepulchres the world holds, or ever held, were all round me, pale and dim as an eclipse, once, when my eyes had closed a minute against those flying heads and deformed imps. The storm died away, but hung dumb like the very frown of God, as a ceiling over that moonlight looking monstrous burial ground, all sleeping like the very dead below, but all peat and mossy with a thousand years; ruins of ruins, a place of sculls; from the stone coffin to the little urn for a child's heart, to the least span-long green grave The Cyhiraeth is a doleful preternatural sound, heard by the nearest kin of some dying person. The sound of fastening down the dead in their coffins is also said by the Welsh to be heard, in like manner, as a premonition of the death of a dear friend. hid in the black shadows of those tumbling monuments; all was ruinous and all was lifeless, soundless; the very light looked dead, pale, and faint as the colour of the primrose! I could have slept into death's arms sweetly then methought. -But suddenly watchdogs, far, far away down in the world, bark, bark! rustle, rustle,-flew by me spirits on spirits; I held my breath, for I knew something was brewing of strange horror,-held-listened-good God! all the deathbells in the world began to toll, toll, toll! there had been a second murder of the innocent! Heaven receive one and all those little souls to its mercy!" Thus ends the life of David Beynon; for to follow the fate of man after the loss of mind is like following the body's history through all the stages of corruption after the departure of the soul. THE MAD! WHAT a volume of terrible pathos is condensed in that word! success and failure, hope and fear, shame and glory, even night and day, are to them no more. In the scale of sentient existences they are gone down beneath the brute, back beyond infancy! babes and brutes are the perfect creation of God's hand; these are ruins. They are no longer parts of the great tree of life, but excrescences better gone, the lingering yellow leaf that is dead, yet not fallen. Where is the rational being that can stand a real mourner by a madman's grave? bitter destiny! which, without fault of ours, turns our best friends against us even to the desiring our death. And as the new-born or the unborn child, coiled in its safe ark or in its nurse's arms, defies all fortunes, and weathers all fate's storms, beyond the greatest hero, so it is with them. Thrones fall, others rise on their ruins. Empires and cities are overthrown, overrun, consumed; what is all to them? what armies, earthquakes, sword, fire? They pick pebbles or field-flowers while their native city is bombarded. Is a breach made? they keep their old place in the sun still, beneath what bit is left of a wall, and perhaps smile, but wonder not, at the eclipse from the noisome volumed smoke of the artillery, or return home. by instinctive habit, thinking it the black evening. When the town's at last taken by storm, the enemy entering pellmell; bells tolling alarms, women tearing their hair, children bleeding at their breasts; houses blazing, palaces thundering down before the point blank range of cannon, shells bursting, friends killing friends, brothers brothers in the darkness or desperation, and the streets running blood- what do the mad? they clap their hands at the sport, or stick another flower in their fluttering rags, till a sword or bullet reunites them to human lot, and even death himself is overcome by them; for not a terror has he for them, "king of terrors" though he be called, and terrible to all. "Oh, Death, where is thy sting?" can be asked by them only, those panoplied philosophers, those inly armed with a sevenfold shield" for heart and brain,"-the Mad! After all, madness is but a mercy in excess. To be forgetful of past evils, fearless of those to come, is not this the highest dispensation of merciful Providence? And madness is but the extreme of this blessing. We walk this our mysterious abode, pursued by cruel memories, confronted by gorgon horrors; and who could bear to walk, but for the cloud which nature interposes betwixt the mind and them, (as the goddess, in Homer, saved her son when overmatched.) And what is madness but that cloud too closely folded round her child? Partial oblivion of the past, partial blindness to the future, form the summum bonum of human comforts, our perpetual salvation from despair, as that celestial shield was, from his furious enemy, to the Trojan hero. As I have ventured to depict the storm of the first onset of insanity, it seems fit to conclude with the calm into which it most generally sinks. As wild war leads peace in its train by the solitude it makes,-as sleep follows agony produced by its very excess, as, in all things, calm succeeds to conflict, so has madness its natural cure, if we may so call it. Nature seems to observe a sort of secret harmony in destruction, observable even in the works of man, whose hand is but nature's tool, and whose proudest works, therefore, are still nature's. Alternations of ruin and restoration proceed all round us, regular and as little felt as the motion with which our planet spins on its axle, with all its freight of towers, cities, and enormous rotundity of earth. Looking at these green ivy-mantled skeletons of castles, which every where beautify our most picturesque country, we think little of the time when the moat (now a primrose-bank for a child to play on with a house lamb,) stood full of defensive water, and that water often tinged with blood and full of dead. There was a time when molten lead came murderously down from those chinks, now leafy, through which we see the moon and the deep blue midnight sky. All horrors of a siege; famine within those walls, fury without; death and cruelty raged there awhile; then silence-ashes-car |