It is so _literal_ that the competent hearer, or reader, instantly realizes, from its words, things. Well do we remember sitting in Wales with a group of Welsh ministers and Welshmen round a pleasant tea-table; we were talking of the Welsh language, and one of our company, who had perhaps done more than any one of his own country for popular Welsh literature, and was one of the order of eminent Welsh preachers of whom we are speaking, broke forth: “Oh!” he said, “you English people cannot see all the things in your Bible that a Welshman can see; now your word ‘_blessed_,’ it seems a very dear sweet thing to an Englishman and to a Welshman, but a Welshman sees the _thing_ in the word, ‘_Gwyn ei fyd_,’ that is, ‘_a white world_—white,’ literally, white their world; so a Welshman would see there is a ‘_white world_’ for the pure in heart, a ‘_white world_’ for the poor in spirit, a ‘_white world_’ for them who are reviled and persecuted for righteousness’ sake; and when you read, ‘_Blessed_ is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity,’ the Welshman reads his Bible and sees there is a ‘_white world_’ for such a one, that is, all sin wiped out, the place quite clean, to begin again.”
This is not all. We are not intending to devote any considerable space to a vindication of the Welsh language, but, when we speak of it with reference to the effects it produces as the vehicle of Oratory, it is necessary to remark that, so far from being,—as many have supposed who have only looked at it in its strange combination of letters on a page, perhaps unable to read it, and never having heard it spoken,—so far from being harsh and rugged, coarse or guttural, it probably yields to no language in delicious softness, in melting sweetness; in this it has been likened to the Italian language by those who have been best able to judge. Lord Lyttleton, in his “Letters from Wales,” says, that when he first passed some of the Welsh hills, and heard the harp and the beautiful female peasants accompanying it with their melodious voices, he could not help indulging in the idea that he had descended the Alps, and was enjoying the harmonious pleasures of the Italian Paradise. And as we have already said, there has long prevailed an idea that the Welsh language is a multitude of consonants; but indeed the reverse is the case; the learned Eliezer Williams says, in his “Historical Anecdotes of the Welsh Language,” “The alphabet itself demonstrates that the charge of a multiplicity of consonants is fallacious, since, whether the number of letters be reckoned twenty-two or twenty-four, seven are vowels; there remain therefore a more inconsiderable number than most of the European languages are obliged to admit . . . . _Y_ and _w_ are considered as vowels, and sounded as such; _w_ is pronounced like _o u_ in French in the word _oui_.” To persons ignorant of the language, how strange is the appearance, and how erroneous the idea of the sound to be conveyed by _dd_, _ll_, _ch_, but indeed all these are indications of the softening of the letter; in a word, the impressions entertained of the harshness of the language are altogether erroneous.