A happier day, dear chorister, is thine, A grave unhaunted by the tread of fear; A little forest, free from kites and crime, When music only meets thy listening ear,— Save when the Demon of the boisterous North Rushed through the gloom of night with sullen roar, Led from destruction’s den the Furies forth, To roll his dying victims on the shore. ’Twas thine amid the raging of the storm, To see thy Stanley disappoint the grave; Tread the dread beach in Charity’s mild form, And bid her Penrhos ope’ its doors to save. And thine as playful in these flow’ry glades, To hear the prayer ascend to Mercy’s throne, To hear from strangers, shelter’d in these shades, The grateful blessings breath’d in tongues {59} unknown. ST. BRIDE’S, OR TOWYN CHAPEL; AND THE ANCIENT TUMULUS. Here friends and foes Lie close, unmindful of their former feuds. The name of _barrows_ is given to the artificial hills which were in ancient times very generally constructed to commemorate the mighty dead. Such hills are usually formed of earth, but sometimes of heaped stones. In the latter form, they are almost exclusively confined to Scotland, and are there called _cairns_. Barrows are found in almost every country, from America to the steppes of Tartary, and probably exhibit the earliest, and assuredly the grandest species of honorary burial; a humble relic of which we still retain in the mounds of earth over the graves of our churchyards. Assuming that the barrow indicates, in the matter of sepulture, the first step of man from the merely savage state, it does not seem to have been forsaken for monuments of greater art and delicacy until such further advances in civilization had been made as might be indicated to a careful inquirer by the alteration in the form or structure of the _tumulus_ itself, and still more by the contents which might be disinterred; for it was in all, except perhaps the very earliest instances, customary to bury with the dead their weapons, their ornaments, and other articles of value. In the barrows of the earliest period we might expect to find no more than the bones of the uncoffined and unurned barbarian with his arrow heads of flint; while those of a later period would furnish stone and earthen coffins, urns of metal and earthenware, spears, swords, shields, bracelets, beads, mirrors, combs, and even coins and cloths,—articles which are actually found in some _tumuli_, and most of them in those of this country.