house is burnt or falls, you will find it there after half a century,
only cloaked by the ever-ready ivy. Sluggish man seems never to have
struck a pick into it; his new hut is built close by on ground not
encumbered, and the old stones are still left lying.

This is the ordinary Welsh village; but there are exceptions, where
people of more cultivated tastes have been led to settle, and
Llanblethian is one of the more signal of these. A decidedly cheerful
group of human homes, the greater part of them indeed belonging to
persons of refined habits; trimness, shady shelter, whitewash, neither
conveniency nor decoration has been neglected here. Its effect from
the distance on the eastward is very pretty: you see it like a little
sleeping cataract of white houses, with trees overshadowing and
fringing it; and there the cataract hangs, and does not rush away from
you.

John Sterling spent his next five years in this locality. He did not
again see it for a quarter of a century; but retained, all his life, a
lively remembrance of it; and, just in the end of his twenty-first
year, among his earliest printed pieces, we find an elaborate and
diffuse description of it and its relations to him,--part of which
piece, in spite of its otherwise insignificant quality, may find place
here:--

"The fields on which I first looked, and the sands which were marked
by my earliest footsteps, are completely lost to my memory; and of
those ancient walls among which I began to breathe, I retain no
recollection more clear than the outlines of a cloud in a moonless
sky. But of L----, the village where I afterwards lived, I persuade
myself that every line and hue is more deeply and accurately fixed