Take first one of the later poems, the mystical 'Song to the Wind,' which even in its English dress won Emerson's admiration, and which, if we allow for all differences between mediæval and modern imagination, is as wonderful a poem of its kind as any literature is likely to afford. As it is given among our selections, it need not be quoted here. In point of time it is usual to assign it, as Stephens does, to the twelfth or thirteenth century. But it seems to me to bear traces again of being an older, more primitive poem, retouched certainly, and probably reshaped, by a twelfth-century poet. And now for a genuine Taliesin, or what at any rate many critics think to be genuine. This you may have in the famous 'Gwaith Gwenystrad' (Battle of Gwenystrad), one of the most spirited war poems in existence, copied and recopied by a long succession of Kymric scribes, and which the writer came upon first in the MS. collection of William Morris o Gaergybi yn Mon, who flourished about 1758. Here are four lines of Morris's copy _literatim_, which will give a better idea than any criticism of mine of the mingled realism and imagination of the poem:-- "Yn nrws rhyd gwelais i wyr lledruddion, Eirf ddillwng y rhag blawt gofedon, Unynt tanc gan aethant golludion, Llaw ynghroes gryd ygro granwynion." And here is a rough, vigorous translation of these lines from the same volume:-- "In the pass of the fort have I seen men, dyed with red, who hurtled their arms.... They fell to the ground together when the day was lost, their hands on the crucifix. And horror was in the pale face of the dead warriors." A succeeding line, "A gwyar a uaglei ar ddillad," (And the blood was tangled in their clothing), adds the last touch of dreadful sincerity to the account. And in other primitive poems that we may ascribe to Taliesin are effects as convincing and vivid. But we must leave Taliesin and his difficulties, to sketch briefly the course of poetry between his actual date in early time and his poetic resurrection in the Middle Ages. Not so interesting poetically but more important historically is the next of the Welsh bards, Aneurin, who wrote the 'Gododin.' This curious and interesting war poem tells of a foray made by the Ottadini, an early Kymric tribe, living in the greater Wales of their time, on the Northumbrian coast. Mr. Stephens imagines Cattraeth, which figures as a central scene of the action of the poem, to be Catterick in Yorkshire; and this we may provisionally accept. "The Welshmen went to Cattraeth; and merry marched the host. But thro' drinking the gray mead, the day--the day was lost." The expedition was one of those which show the gradual cession of greater Wales by the Welsh, and their retreat to the lesser Wales that is still theirs.