Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
England: Vols. I–IV. 1876–79.

Wales: Twydee

Twydee

By William Peter (1788–1853)

GO, roam through this isle; view her oak-bosomed towers,

View the scenes which her Stowes and her Blenheims impart;

See lawns, where proud wealth has exhausted its powers,

And nature is lost in the mazes of art:

Far fairer to me

Are the shades of Twydee,

With her rocks, and her floods, and her wild blossomed bowers.

Here mountain on mountain exultingly throws,

Through storm, mist, and snow, its bleak crags to the sky;

In their shadow the sweets of the valley repose,

While streams gay with verdure and sunshine steal by;

Here bright hollies bloom

Through the deep thicket’s gloom,

And the rocks wave with woodbine and hawthorn, and rose.

’T is eve; and the sun faintly glows in the west,

But thy flowers, fading Skyrrid, are fragrant with dew,

And the Usk, like a spangle in nature’s dark vest,

Breaks, in gleams of far moonlight, more soft on the view;

By valley and hill

All is lovely and still,

And we linger, as lost, in some isle of the blest.

O, how happy the man who from fashion’s cold ray

Flies to shades sweet as these, with the one he loves best!

With the smiles of affection to gladden their day,

And the nightingale’s vespers to lull them to rest;

While the torments of life,

Its ambition and strife,

Pass, like storms heard at distance, unheeded away.