and "The Epic of Hades." As the Rev. Elvet Lewis writes of him: "Here at
once we meet the true artist lost in his art. His humour is as playful
as if the hand of a stern fate had never struck him on the face. His
muse can laugh and make others laugh, or it can weep and make others
weep." A specimen is given of one of his best known poems, "An Ode on
the Day of Judgment," reproducing, as far as my powers have permitted,
its final and internal rhymes and other metrical effects.

We now reach the most individual of the modern Welsh religious and
philosophical poets, Islwyn (William Thomas), who took his Bardic title
from the hill of Islwyn in his native Monmouthshire. He was greatly
influenced by the poetry of Wordsworth, but was in no sense an imitator.
Yet whilst, in the words of one of the Triads, he possessed the three
things essential to poetic genius, "an eye to see nature, a heart to
feel nature: and courage that dares follow nature"--he steadfastly
refused to regard poetry as an art and, by declining to use the
pruning-knife, allowed the finest fruits of his poetic talents to lie
buried beneath immense accumulations of weedy and inferior growth. Yet
what his powers were may not be ill judged of, even in translation, by
the passage from his blank verse poem, "The Storm," entitled "Behind the
Veil," to be found on p. 94.

Pantycelyn (the Rev. William Williams) was a co-worker with Howel Harris
and Daniel Rowlands in the Methodist revival. Professor W.J. Gruffyd
writes of him: "It is not enough to say he was a hymnologist--he was
much more. He is the National Poet of Wales. He had certainly the
loftiest imagination of all the poets of five centuries, and his
influence on the Welsh people can be gauged by the fact that a good deal
of his idiom or dialect has fixed itself indelibly in modern literary
Welsh." The Hymn, "Marchog Jesu!" which represents him was translated by