The Rock Of Cader Idris

I

AY on that rock where the storms have their dwelling,    The birthplace of phantoms, the home of the cloud;  Around it for ever deep music is swelling,    The voice of the mountain-wind, solemn and loud.  'Twas a midnight of shadows all fitfully streaming,   Of wild waves and breezes, that mingled their moan;

Of dim shrouded stars, as from gulfs faintly gleaming;   And I met the dread gloom of its grandeur alone.

I lay there in silence–a spirit came o'er me;   Man's tongue hath no language to speak what I saw:

Things glorious, unearthly, passed floating before me,   And my heart almost fainted with rapture and awe.

I viewed the dread beings around us that hover,   Though veil'd by the mists of mortality's breath;

And I called upon darkness the vision to cover,   For a strife was within me of madness and death.

I saw them–the powers of the wind and the ocean,   The rush of whose pinion bears onward the storms;

Like the sweep of the white-rolling wave was their motion,   I felt their dim presence,–but knew not their forms !  I saw them–the mighty of ages departed–   The dead were around me that night on the hill:  From their eyes, as they passed, a cold radiance they darted,–   There was light on my soul, but my heart's blood was chill.

I saw what man looks on, and dies–but my spirit   Was strong, and triumphantly lived through that hour;

And, as from the grave,

I awoke to inherit   A flame all immortal, a voice, and a power !

Day burst on that rock with the purple cloud crested,   And high Cader Idris rejoiced in the sun;– But O ! what new glory all nature invested,   When the sense which gives soul to her beauty was won !

This was included in her book of songs "Welsh Melodies" which helped to give Mrs hemans a reputation as a fine songstress as well as a poet.

It is an old tradition of the Welsh bards, that on the summit of the mountain Cader Idris is an excavation resembling a couch; and that whoever should pass a night in that hollow, would be found in the morning either dead, in a state of frenzy, or endowed with the highest poetical inspiration.

JS