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How far the name and idea of Chautauqua have since spread there is no saying, but it was the last of our national inventions which I should have expected to find in Aberystwyth, though Welsh culture was reasonably in its line, and the Eisteddfod was not out of keeping with the summer conferences held beside our lovely up-State lake.
I sat, several years ago, at the Welsh National Eisteddfod, under the vast tent in which the Bard of Wales was being crowned. After the small golden crown had been placed in unsteady equilibrium on the head of a clever-looking pressman, several Welsh bards came on the platform and recited little epigrams. A Welsh bard is, if young, a pressman, and if of maturer years, a divine.
A meeting of the society is held every year, when prizes are distributed to the authors of the best compositions in prose and verse. It somewhat resembles the annual meeting of the Eisteddfod, held for awarding prizes to the bards and composers of Wales. The following was his impromptu to the savants of Toulouse, 4th July, 1840: "Oh, bon Dieu! que de gloire! Oh, bon Dieu! que d'honneurs!
Hemans' poems is one written for an Eisteddfod, or meeting of Welsh Bards, held in London, May 22, 1822.
But the Druid's knife is gone from his hands; so we sought the shelter of the Eisteddfod building. The sight inside was not lively. The president and his supporters mustered strong on the platform.
He had the lissom hands and cheerful self-absorption that bring success. He had met Maray at an Eisteddfod that had been held in days gone by on a hill five miles from the Callow, called God's Little Mountain, and crowned by a chapel.
Walpole had issued an order prohibiting the Chester Eisteddfod, all the Englishmen from Cornwall to John o' Groat's House would have rushed to the rescue; and our strong sense and sturdy morality would never have stopped gnashing their teeth and rending their garments till the prohibition was rescinded.
Hemans' poems is one written for an Eisteddfod, or meeting of Welsh Bards, held in London, May 22, 1822.
You cannot, unless you have a very practised ear, say which is the finer singer at an Eisteddfod, but almost any one can see which horse comes in first at a race. What is most striking in the mixture of strains in England is that it apparently has not ultimately mixed them; and perhaps after a thousand years the racial traits will be found marking Americans as persistently.
We have spoken of her humour. Those who would see a sample of it are referred to her description of the Eisteddfod on p. 22; and this piece of pungent fun may be profitably read in contrast with her grim story of Gladys Leonora Pratt. In that story some of the writer's saddest experiences in the East End are told with an unshrinking fidelity, which yet has nothing mawkish or prurient in it.
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