The March of the Monks of Bangor 4.. Sir Walter Scott

POEMS, HISTORIC AND

LEGENDARY.

THE

CAMBRIAN WREATH:

Poems, Historical, Legendary, and Humorous.

ANCIENT BARDS AND DRUIDS.

From Lucan's Pharsalia.

MARCUS ANNEUS LUCAN was of an Equestrian family of Rome, and born at Corduba in Spain about A. D. 39. in the reign of the emperor Caligula. Lucan wrote several poems, but the Pharsalia is the only one that now remains. He suffered death in the 27th year of his age, and the tenth of the emperor Nero. The Pharsalia was translated from the original Latin into English verse by Mr. Nicholas Rowe, who died in 1718, just as he had completed his

version.

YE Bards whom sacred raptures fire

To chaunt your heroes to your country's lyre;
Who consecrate in your immortal strain,
Brave patriot souls in righteous battle slain ;
Securely now the tuneful task renew,

And noblest themes in deathless songs pursue.
The Druids now, while arms are heard no more,
Old mysteries, and barb'rous rites restore;
A tribe who singular religion love,

And haunt the lonely coverts of the grove.

B

To these, and these of all mankind alone,
The gods are sure reveal'd, or sure unknown.
If dying mortals' dooms they sing aright,
No ghosts descend to dwell in dreadful night;
No parting souls to grisly Pluto go,
Nor seek the dreary silent shades below;
But forth they fly immortal in their kind,
And other bodies in new worlds they find.
Thus life for ever runs its endless race,
And like a line, death but divides the space,
A stop which can but for a moment last,
A point between the future and the past.
Thrice happy they beneath their northern skies
Who that worst fear, the fear of death despise ;
Hence they no cares for this frail being feel,
But rush undaunted on the pointed steel:
Provoke approaching fate, and bravely scorn
To spare that life which must so soon return.

THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE ANCIENT
BRITISH BARDS.

An Ode, in the manner of Taliesin.

BY EDWARD WILLIAMS, (IOLO MORGANWG.)

THE following abbreviated account of the doctrine of the METEMPSYCHOSIS, which forms the machinery of this poem, is from the author's own introduction to it. "All animated beings originate in the lowest point of existence, whence, by a regular gradation, they rise higher and higher in the scale of existence, till they arrive at the highest state of happiness and perfection that is possible for finite beings. Beings, as their souls, by passing from ferocious to more gentle and harmless animals, approach the state of humanity. become ameliorated in their dispositions, less influenced by evil, and