II

So sweet a sound as that childish voice I had never heard before.
I held my breath and listened.

Into my very being that child-voice passed, and it was a new music
and a new joy. I can give the reader no notion of it, because there
is not in nature anything with which I can compare it. The blackcap
has a climacteric note, just before his song collapses and dies, so
full of pathos and tenderness that often, when I had been sitting on
a gate in Wilderness Road, it had affected me more deeply than any
human words. But here was a note sweet and soft as that, and yet
charged with a richness no blackcap's song had ever borne, because no
blackcap has ever felt the joys and sorrows of a young human soul.

The voice was singing in a language which seemed strange to me then,
but has been familiar enough since:

Bore o'r cymwl aur,
Eryri oedd dy gaer.
Bren o wyllt a gwar,
Gwawr ysbrydau.[Footnote]

[Footnote: Morning of the golden cloud,
Eryrl was thy castle,
King of the wild and tame,
Glory of the spirits of air!]

[Eryri--the Place of Eagles, i.e. Snowdon.]