clothed with tender trefoil” goes on the song; “I love the marches of Merioneth where my head was pillowed on a snow-white arm.”  In the Celtic love of woman there is little of the Teutonic depth and earnestness, but in its stead a childlike spirit of delicate enjoyment, a faint distant flush of passion like the rose-light of dawn on a snowy mountain peak, a playful delight in beauty.  “White is my love as the apple-blossom, as the ocean’s spray; her face shines like the pearly dew on Eryri; the glow of her cheeks is like the light of sunset.”  The buoyant and elastic temper of the French trouveur was spiritualized in the Welsh singers by a more refined poetic feeling.  “Whoso beheld her was filled with her love.  Four white trefoils sprang up wherever she trod.”  A touch of pure fancy such as this removes its object out of the sphere of passion into one of delight and reverence.

[Sidenote:  The Bards]

It is strange to pass from the world of actual Welsh history into such a world as this.  But side by side with this wayward, fanciful stream of poesy and romance ran a torrent of intenser song.  The spirit of the earlier bards, their joy in battle, their love of freedom, broke out anew in ode after ode, in songs extravagant, monotonous, often prosaic, but fused into poetry by the intense fire of patriotism which glowed within them.  Every fight, every hero had its verse.  The names of older singers, of Taliesin, Aneurin, and Llywarch Hen, were revived in bold forgeries to animate the national resistance and to prophesy victory.  It was in North Wales that the spirit of patriotism received its strongest inspiration from this burst of song.  Again and again Henry the Second was driven to retreat from the impregnable fastnesses where the “Lords of Snowdon,” the princes of the house of Gruffydd ap Conan, claimed supremacy over the whole of Wales.  Once in the pass of Consilt a cry arose that the king was slain, Henry of Essex flung down the royal standard, and the king’s desperate efforts could hardly save his army from utter rout.  The bitter satire of the Welsh singers bade him knight his horse, since its speed had alone saved him from capture.  In a later campaign the invaders were met by storms of rain, and forced to abandon their baggage in a headlong flight to Chester.  The greatest of the Welsh odes, that known to English readers in Gray’s translation as “The Triumph of Owen,” is Gwalchmai’s song of victory over the repulse of an English fleet from Abermenai.

[Sidenote:  Llewelyn ap Jorwerth]

The long reign of Llewelyn the son of Jorwerth seemed destined to realize the hopes of his countrymen.  The homage which he succeeded in extorting from the whole of the Welsh chieftains during a reign which lasted from 1194 to 1246 placed him openly at the head of his race, and gave a new character to its struggle with the English king.  In consolidating his authority within his own domains, and in the assertion