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
