The Death of Hoel. Selected from the Gododin of Aneurin,* styled the Monarch of the Bards He flourished about the time of Taliessin, A.D. 570. See Mr. Evans's Specimens, p. 71 and 73. HAD I but the torrent's might, With headlong rage and wild affright To rush, and sweep them from the world! * Aneurin with the flowing Muse, King of Bards, brother to Gildas Albanius the historian, lived under Mynyddawg of Edinburgh, a prince of the North, whose Eurdorchogion, or warriors wearing the golden torques, three hundred and sixty-three in number, were all slain, except Aneurin and two others, in a battle with the Saxons at Cattraeth, on the eastern coast of York shire. His Gododin, an heroic poem written on that event, is perhaps the oldest and noblest production of that age." Jones's Relics, vol. i. p. 17. 1 The kingdom of Deïra included the counties of Yorkshire, Durham, Lan cashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland. Too, too secure in youthful pride, By them, my friend, my Hoel, died, He ask'd no heaps of hoarded gold; He ask'd and had the lovely maid. To Cattraeth's vale in glittering row, Thrice two hundred warriors go: Every warrior's manly neck Chains of regal honor deck, Wreathed in many a golden link: Or the grape's ecstatic juice. Flush'd with mirth and hope they burn: And I, the meanest of them all, That live to weep and sing their fall. HAVE ye seen the tusky boar,' CONAN's name, my lay, rehearse, Did the sword of Conan mow The crimson harvest of the foc. This and the following short fragment ought to have appeared among the Posthumous Pieces of Gray; but it was thought preferable to insert them in this place with the preceding fragment from the Gododin. Epitaph ON MRS. CLARKE. Lo! where this silent marble weeps, And soft humanity were there. In agony, in death resign'd, She felt the wound she left behind. Her infant image here below Sits smiling on a father's woe: |