FRIEND, dead and gone so long!

Was it not well with thee, while yet thy tread.

Gladdened this much-loved land of thine and ours?

Came not thy footsteps sometimes through life's flowers?
Knew'st thou no crown but that which bears the thorn?
Amid the careless crowd, obscure, forlorn;

Who sittest now among the blessed dead
Crowned with immortal song ?

A humble peasant boy,

Reared amid penury through youth's fair years, The fugitive joys of youth thou didst despise, Ease, sport, the kindling glance of maiden's eyes; Thou knew'st no other longing but desire,

With young lips parching with the sacred fire,

To drink deep draughts of knowledge mixed with tears-
A dear-bought innocent joy.

1 Suggested by the Rev. Robert Jones's Life and Works of the Rev. Goronwy Owen.

B

The treasure-house of Time

Lay open to thy young and passionate thought:
The bard who sang the tale of Troy divine,
The tragic pomps, the Athenian fancies fine,
The stately Roman, marching to the swell
Of his own verse,-all these thou lovedst well;
And yet it was no one of these that taught
The secret of thy rhyme.

For to the ancient tongue

Thou didst attune thy lyre. Thou hadst no choice
To what fair measures thou shouldst fit thy song,
But to the bardic numbers sweet and strong,
The old melodious Cymric accents deep,

Didst wed the winged thoughts that might not sleep,
Singing as sings the thrush, with clearer voice
Than ever bard had sung.

And for a fitting meed

What was 't thy country gave thee? Thou didst give

Thy life to serve the Master; yet didst ask

No high reward or guerdon for thy task,

No alien mitre for thy patriot head,

Only assurance of thy children's bread,

The things that perish for the words that live,

'Twas a poor wage indeed!

Yet not even this was thine;

The great ones of thy land took little heed
For souls like thine, pent by the vulgar crowd;
Hungering for pelf and place with clamour loud,
What care had peer or prelate for thy lays?
Thou wouldst not stoop to crown with venal praise
Souls gross with pride and sunk in vulgar greed,
Through thy sweet verse divine.

Then hope deferred too long

Sickening the heart-the bard's too sensitive brain--These seizing thee, drove thee at last to seek Oblivion of the pain thou couldst not speak, Forgetfulness of failure, brief surcease

Of long solicitudes, which is not peace!

There is a joy with deadlier tooth than pain,
A self-inflicted wrong!

And hadst thou then no friend

To mark, to chide, to cherish, and to praise ?
Aye! one thou hadst, whose dear and honoured name
Gains added lustre from thy greater fame,

Who knew the voice of genius, and who knew
The long steep path between it and its due;
He with wise bounty smoothed the anxious days
Which only death might end.

And thou, bright soul, in turn,

Didst with such grateful song thy friend requite,
That through all future days of bards to be
He lives immortal in thy Elegy;

He lives a poet in a poet's verse

Whose praises still his country shall rehearse,
When in high congress, 'in the eye of light',
The bardic accents burn.

Two poets from one isle,

The greater thou, and he, though great, the less, 'The Lion of Mona'. In the ranks of song Learning nor fame avails; nought but the strong Sweet inspiration which the rapt soul knows, When with the fire of heaven the swift lyre glows And wakes the strain which joyless lives shall bless, Making life's desert smile.

What though thy pitiless lot

Drove thee an exile o'er the Atlantic sea,

Far, far, from thy beloved land, and set

Where alien fortunes lured thee to forget

Thy too cold mother; yet thy soul would yearn
For thy dear Wales,-unchanged thy verse would burn
In the old tongue thy birthright gave to thee-
Sweet accents unforgot!

What though an exile's grave

Holds thee, yet thou art blest. Great God! is it more To have crept to the grave, to have crawled a slave from birth, Leaving nought richer but the charnel-earth,

A lump of grosser clay, rotten with ease,

Surfeit with gold, sodden with luxuries,

And pine in vain before heaven's close-shut door
Bearing no pain to save?

Than to have known indeed

The sweet creative pang; and to have heard
The accents of the gods; and climbed with pain,
As thou didst, all thy journey,-nor in vain,
But seen as thou didst, on the summits white
Clear rays, though broken, of the Eternal Light,
And those dread gates open without a word
For the heart and knees that bleed?

Rest, tranquil, happy ghost;

Thou art blest indeed, whate'er thy earthly ills!
The worldlings who once passed thee in life's race
Lie in dishonour; no man knows their place,
Faded and gone; their very names have fled;
No memory keeps the undistinguished dead;
Thy fame still green thy grateful country fills--
Fame never to be lost!

WELSH PARTICLES.

BY PROFESSOR PETER, OF BALA.

PARTS of speech are advantageously classified into Words, Presentive and Symbolical (Earle's Philology of the English Tongue, p. 220). Presentive words are vocables which denote objective realities, whether as existences, attributes, or actions. Symbolical words are vocables which denote relations of the same, as subjectively conceived by the mind. Presentive words are the matter of language, and symbolical the form. The former are conveniently treated in the dictionary; the latter in the grammar. Inflections are nearly related to symbolical words.

One of the excellences of language is an abundance of Verbs, Nouns, and Adjectives, to express outward objects; but its highest excellence is the perfection of its formal element, so as to express the conceptions and emotions of the mind. The Welsh language, like the Greek, is rich in that class of symbolical words called Particles. These particles were noticed by Dr. Davies and even by Edeyrn Dafod Aur, but it was Arfonwyson who first proposed to raise them to the rank of a part of speech. They are peculiar to the Cymric branch of the Celtic languages, and are very delicate in their functions, being used to point out the exact relation to one another of the phrases or parts of the sentence, while conjunctions denote the relations of complete sentences, and prepositions connect words. This may not be a strictly accurate definition of their functions, but it may provisionally serve to give the student an idea of the mutual relations of these allied parts of speech.