Welsh Journals

better to set forth the questions than to come to any conclusions on present data. We are in the region of guess-work. The prologue in the elegy on Nest, passes from one type of nature poetry to another. A plausible case can be made out for an intentional contrast between the calm of the one and the stress of the other. The second nature- piece may possibly be a rare survival of a one-time con- vention not the convention of the opening lines, but one of an allegorical type. In Howel ab Owain Gwynedd's eulogy of Gwynedd1 the art is a different one entirely from that which I have just described. The poem is unfortunately unique of its kind in Welsh poetry, and no traces of a similar kind can be detected in other poems, or inferred from them, either in this period, or by way of survival in the one immediately following. The poem is in two parts of unequal length. The white foaming wave drenches the grave, the watch- place of Rhufawn Befr, the chief of kings. I love the hated of England-the bright land of the north to-day, and about the confines of Lliw the myriad spears.2 I love him who gave me gifts of mead, where the seas clutch the land in long turmoil. I love her household and her clustered homes, and the waging of war at her king's pleasure. I love her sea-lands and her mountains, and her fort hard by the wood, and her beautiful lands, and her meadows and their waters, and her valleys and her white sea-gulls and her lovely women. I love her warriors and her shapely steeds, her woods and her mighty ones and her homesteads. I love her 1 MA3, 86. 2 lleudir is obscure; 'bright land' would make sense here, but the word occurs in Englynion y beddeu, Black Book of Carmarthen (Skene, ii, 32) The grave of the lord of Prydain^n the lleutir of Gwynnassed, where the Lliw goes into Llychwr' where it seems to have a geographical meaning. Is it by accident that lleudir is associated with the river Lliw again? Myriad spears' is a doubtful rendering of lliaws calledd, literally a multitude of stalks