and after a while beheld it stretching beneath me upon my left hand. The valley forms a bowl among the hills. The bottom is a small grassy plain, dotted with trees, which has obtained the appellation of Beauty sleeping in the lap of Terror. The mountains that surround the vale, have a wild and rugged appearance. As I proceeded along the road towards the head of the valley, a horn was sounded from the mountain, and I perceived a Welsh girl standing upon a projecting eminence: bare headed and bare footed, was this nymph of Cambria; her cheeks were swelled out with her occupation, and she looked like a female _Boreas_, bursting with the wind she was sending forth by degrees to alarm the _world_.
She eyed me with glances of curiosity all the while, and I thought she could perhaps give me some information about the valley, which might be interesting; so quitting the direct road, I scrambled up the hill side, and asked her the meaning of her sounding the horn so loudly? But she either did not, or would not, understand me; and after vainly endeavouring to extract any thing from her, I quietly sat myself down, delighted by the splendid view beneath me, and gave vent to my feelings in the following lines:
Llynn Gwynant, Llynn Gwynant! how bless’d should I be, When the winter of life crowns my temples with snow, To rest on thy margin, with her who loves me, And children whose love gathers strength as they grow.
There are mountains whose peaks rise more lofty by far, And valleys more spacious and fertile to view, But of all the high hills and green glens that there are, Llynn Gwynant give me, with its waters of blue.
Lynn Gwynant, Lynn Gwynant! I bid thee farewell, Where peace in the beauty of solitude glows, Again in the cold hearted city to dwell, And pine for the calm of thy blissful repose.
Farewell to the lake with the surface of glass, Brown heath and blue mountains—abode of the free! This heart, like the flood from the high _Ffynnon Las_, { 250} Will leap from its gloom to find rapture in thee.
Having nearly reached the extremity of this valley, I gazed, from my elevated situation, upon the dark and perpendicular rocks on the opposite side; and towering in the air immediately over the centre of the valley was an eagle with expanded wings, apparently motionless. Presently it rose a little higher, but without the slightest visible exertion, then stooped again, mounted once more, and, as fast as the eye could follow, swept round the huge buttresses of sharp ridged cliffs, that hang over the entrance of the pass of Llanberis.