Had Glendour lived in peaceful times, he would have been a poet of no ordinary rank. The bard Rhys Coch, was his cotemporary and chosen associate in his days of woes and wanderings. A stone still remains near Bethgellert, where the bard used to sit and pour forth the melody of his harp to his own inspiring lays. There, tradition says, Glendour would sit beside him in that beloved retreat, where around them was all the stern majesty of nature, in her darkest, her loneliest, her loveliest moods. The rapid Gwinan prattled near them over her rocky bed, laving on one side green meadows, filled with cowslips and cuckoo-flowers, where cattle feed, and skirted with groves of oak, and ash, and birch; on the other, its bright waters race beside a wild and heathy tract of moorland, which slopes upward to the very base of Snowdon, that king of mountains, whose awful brow is often hidden in the clouds. The bard, too, had suffered much, and had fled from cave to cave, and from hill to hill, pursued by the English forces, who sought to still those bold and pathetic strains--those deep laments, which aroused his countrymen to fresh deeds of valour against their oppressors. His enemies were not permitted to accomplish their designs. He continually eluded their pursuit, and died at length in peace, amid his beloved haunts of Bethgellert. Here then stands the ancient tree, though reft of its former greatness. More than four hundred years have elapsed since Owen Glendour climbed its lofty trunk, and surveyed the battle-field of Tewksbury; since his bannered hosts were stationed round, and he heard the shout which told him that his friend had fallen.