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.

The Welsh language has several contrivances for indicating the emphatic words of a sentence. The copula, or verb bod, possesses in the present tense four different forms, the use of which depends mostly on the place of the emphasis. In like manner the particles above enumerated serve to denote the different members of the sentence when they have been disturbed by emphasis out of their natural order of verb, subject, object (Zeuss, 924). I shall endeavour to illustrate this function of the particles in the present paper.

The particle yn is used to form phrases having the nature of adverbs. Under this general idea, we have three particular cases:-1. Yn changes the adjective following it into a simple adverb. 2. It points out the predicate, whether a noun or an adjective, when joined to the subject by the copula. 3. It is used with verbs requiring two objects, such as verbs of calling, appointing, making, etc., to distinguish the secondary from the direct object. That the vocable is really the same in all these three capacities is indicated by its governing always the same initial mutation, and that mutation being the middle sound proves that yn originally ended in a corresponding consonant, which was dropped after these mutations were developed in the language. On the other hand, the cognate forms, as well as the government of yn preposition, show that it has always ended in a nasal, while the government of the yn before the infinitive points to a third different root, and proves that it ended in an s sound. This third yn, however, may have been only a variation of the preposition (like traws and tra, or os and o, nas and na, nis and ni; as, 'os cefais yn awr ffafr'-Gen. xviii, 3. 'O chefais yn awr ffafr -1 Samuel xxvii, 5. Ac ni chefais neb'-Psalm 1xix, 20. 'Ceisiais ef, ac nis cefais'-Song of Sol. iii, 1).

The following examples will illustrate the use of this particle in modifying adjectives into adverbs :-'a bod ei ddig yn rhwygo yn wastadol, a'i fod yn cadw ei lid yn dragywy

а

ddol-Amos i, 11. Wedi imi ddilyn pob peth yn ddyfal o'r dechreuad'-Luke i, 3. 'O na chawn i fwynhau'r bwystfilod a barottowyd i mi, y rhai y chwenychwn i eu cael уп gyflym, y rhai a lithiaf i'm traflyngcu' n fuan; ac nad arbedont fi, megis yr ofnasant rai eraill, mi a'u cymhellaf hwynt oni's gwnant yn rhwydd’—Ch. Edwards' Y Ffydd Ddiffuant, t. 62, arg. 1856. 'In tywill heb canvill'-Four An. Books, p. 11. ́ Ban diholer taguistil inhir o tir guinet'-ib., p. 23. 'Guledic deduit an gunel inrit erbin dit braud'-ib., 14. 'Ac ar hyny y disgynnawd or nef post o dan y ryngthunt ell deu yn gynaruthret ac y deifyawd eu taryaneu'-Greal, p. 114. 'Ynteu ae hannoges wy y bechu yn varwawl drwy chwant' -ib., p. 127. —ib.,

Let the following examples illustrate the use of yn in the predicate:-1. With nouns; and 2. With adjectives. 1. With nouns, 'Yna y byddant yn fywyd i'th enaid, ac yn ras i'th wddf'-Prov. iii, 22. Bydded eu bord hwy yn rhwyd, ac yn fagl ac yn dramgwydd, ac yn daledigaeth iddynt'-Rom. xi, 9. Ac a'n gwnaeth ni yn frenhinoedd ac yn offeiriaid i Dduw a'i Dad ef'-Rev. i, 6. 'Dyn yn Dduw, a Duw yn ddyn'-Ann Griff. Hymn. 'Gvnaeth duv trvgar gardaud, in evr coeth. kyvoeth y trindawd'-Four An. Books, p. 15. 'A dyuawd yny yttoed yn brenn mawr tec'-Greal, p. 128. 2. With adjectives: 'Sydd oll yn ogoneddus'-Psalm xlv, 13. 'Gan ei fod yn gyfiawn'—Math. i, 19. 'Duu y env in deu, duyuaul y kyffreu, Duu y env in tri duyuuawl y inni, Duu y env in vn, Duu paulac annhun'-Four An. Books, p. 13. 'Eissyoes y dyrnawt adisgynnawd ar y march yny vyd y march yn deu dryll'-Greal, p. 117.

The predicate is also indicated by the middle mutation without yn; as, 'Elias oedd ddyn'-James v, 17. This form cannot be used with the copula mae, oes, or yw, but it often follows sydd. With other tenses than the present of the verb Bod both forms may be used indifferently; or perhaps

with a shade of difference in the emphasis rather than in the meaning. In the above example, the subject, Elias, is emphatic; but if yn be placed before the predicate—yn ddyn— the latter receives the emphasis. However, this change requires another, namely, that the verb precede the subject, so that the order becomes 'yr oedd Elias yn ddyn'.

Verbs signifying 'to appear' have the same construction as bod, e.g., 'Ac yna hi a ymddangoses yn Widdones'-Iolo MSS., p. 177. Other examples of verbs of naming, installing, etc., will be found further on, illustrating the use of the particle y.

The particles a and yr are joined with the verb, when the verb is preceded by any other word or part of the sentence.1 When the preceding word or phrase is the subject or object of the verb, or when both precede it, then a is joined to the verb, as 'a Duw a ddywedodd'-Gen. i, 3. A Iob a attebodd, ac a ddywedodd'-Job xxxiii, 1. 'A'r Iesu a safodd, ac a archodd ei alw ef'-Mark x, 49. 'Periw new a peris idi'--Four An. Books, p. 15. A gwedy eu mynet y gysgu ef a doeth y drws morwyn ieuanc yr honn aelwis ar galaath'Greal, p. 118. (Observe that the former part of this example is at least doubtful, as the phrase preceding the verb is neither the subject nor the object of it, the a being inserted by the influence of the preceding particle fe.) 'A Phaul a adwaen’ -Acts xix, 15. When both nominative and objective precede the verb the language is mostly rhetorical, but the verb is still attended by a, as, 'Gofyn im', a mi it a'i rhydd'— Psalter, ii, 8. 'Y Benywaid mi a'u cadwaf yn ddefaid mammogion'-Iolo MSS., p. 181. 'Pan gwr, ei ffrynd yn ganmlwydd wr a gladd'—(Messiah) Y Golygydd (1850), p. 38. It seems to me that the a of interrogation is, in modern

1 Yn relates the verb to the words following it, and a and y relate it to the words preceding. The order of the words depends upon the emphasis, the emphatic words being placed first in the sentence, as stated above.