Sitting high upon a hill, battle inclined is My mind, and it does not impel me onward. Short is my journey, my tenement is laid waste. Sharp is the gale, it is bare punishment to live, When the trees array themselves in gay colours Of summer, violently ill I am this day. I am no hunter, I keep no animal of the chase, I cannot move about; As long as it pleases the cuckoo, let her sing. The loud-voiced cuckoo sings with the dawn, Her melodious notes in the dales of Cuawg; Better is the lavisher than the miser. At Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing On the blossom covered branches; The loud-voiced cuckoo, let her sing awhile. At Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing, On the blossom covered branches; Woe to the sick that hears their contented notes. At Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing, The recollection in my mind; There are that hear them that will not hear them again. Have I not listened to the cuckoo on the ivied tree? Did not my shield hang down? What I loved is but vexation; what I loved is no more. In such doleful strains the bard continues his parable. The sad note of the Gael is not lacking in him. Myrddin is the fourth great poet of the sixth century. Various poems are reputed his in the _Myvyrian Archaiology_, but they are all probably of a much later date, as Stephens and others think. One of the most interesting to us of these traditional Myrddin pieces is the “I Yscolan.” It appears in the Black Book of Caermarthen. Yscolan is represented as having held a dialogue with Myrddin. To have done so he must have lived in the sixth century. Welsh writers, like Davies and Stephens, identify the name as St. Colan or Columba. “Instead of being unknown to the Cymry of the Middle Ages, no person was better known than Yscolan,” says Stephens. From their view Dr. Skene dissents, and Professor Rhys also holds it utterly impossible that Yscolan was St. Columba, as the two names cannot be connected, _Columba_ being in Welsh _Cwlum_. It is not maintained by any of these critics that the poem, as it stands, is anything like so old as the period of Myrddin. But older it evidently is than the time of Edward I., and this shows, as the Welsh writers affirm, the existence among the bards, from an early date, of a tradition that St. Columba had, in his zeal for Christianity, destroyed some druidic books. This tradition got mixed up with a later one about the books of Cambria, which had been sent to the White Tower of London for security, having been destroyed there by some Vandal of an Yscolan, who must have lived after the twelfth century. But whoever the Yscolan of the dialogue was, Myrddin assails him thus (Stephens’ version):—