"_Tasso._--One impulse all in vein I should resist, Which day and night within my bosom stirs. Life is not life if I must cease to think, Or, thinking, cease to poetize. Forbid the silk-worm any more to spin, Because its own life lies upon the thread. Still it uncoils the precious golden web, And ceases not till, dying, it has closed Its own tomb o'er it. May the good God grant We, one day, share the fate of that same worm!-- That we, too, in some valley bright with heaven, Surprised with sudden joy, may spread our wing. * * * * * I feel--I feel it well--this highest art Which should have fed the mind, which to the strong Adds strength and ever new vitality,-- It is destroying me, it hunts me forth, Where'er I rove, an exile amongst men." _Act V. Scene 2._ DAVID THE "TELYNWR;"[20] OR, THE DAUGHTER'S TRIAL. A TALE OF WALES. BY JOSEPH DOWNES. The inhabitants of the white mountain village of K----, in Cardiganshire, were all retired to rest, it being ten o'clock. No--a single light twinkled from under eaves of thick and mossy thatch, in one cottage apart, and neater than the rest, that skirted the steep _street_, (as the salmon fishers, its chief inhabitants, were pleased to call it,) being, indeed, the rock, thinly covered with the soil, and fringed with long grass, but rudely smoothed, where very rugged, by art, for the transit of a _gamboo_ (cart with small wheels of entire wood) or sledge. The moonlight slept in unbroken lustre on the houses of one story, or without any but what the roof slope formed, and several appearances marked it as a fisher village. A black, oval, pitched basket, as it appeared, hung against the wall of several of the cottages, being the _coracle_, or boat for one person, much used on the larger Welsh rivers, very primitive in form and construction, being precisely described by Caesar in his account of the ancient Britons. Dried salmon and other fish also adorned others, pleasingly hinting of the general honesty and mutual confidence of the humble natives, poor as they were, for strangers were never thought of; the road, such as it was, merely mounting up to "the hill" (the lofty desert of sheepwalk) on one hand, and descending steeply to the river Tivy on the other. A deadened thunder, rising from some fall and brawling shallow "rapid" of the river, was the only sound, except the hooting of an owl from some old ivied building, a ruin apparently, visible on the olive-hued precipice behind. The russet mass of mountain, bulging, as it were, over the little range of cots, gave an air of security to their picturesque white beauty; while silver clouds curled and rolled in masses, grandly veiling their higher peaks, and sometimes canopied the roofs, many reddened with wall-flower; the walls also exhibiting streaks of green, where rains had drenched the vegetating thatch and washed down its tint of yellow green.