CWM BYCHAN. 275 



The Druids exercised all-powerful sway throughout the Cum- 

 brian land, but they preferred the groves of embowering oak and 

 the flowery meadows as sites for their temples. The pure morality 

 inculcated and allegorically expressed, in the usages of this order, 

 have been much misrepresented and perverted, through the imper- 

 fect nature of tradition and the prejudices of historians. The offer- 

 ing of human sacrifices, and the devoting of victims to the fire have 

 been advanced as proofs of barbarous habits, but no authentic evi- 

 dence can be brought forward on which to found such accusations, 

 against the druidic institutions. From what can be collected of the 

 virtue of their precepts and the wisdom of their lore, it is possible 

 that the Druids might have been the depositaries of those brighter 

 gems of religion which, at the ultimate dispersion of mankind, were 

 distributed over the face of the earth, and which subsequently spread 

 their heaven-born light through the dark ages of superstition and 

 coloured with their softening tints even the most extravagant my- 

 thologies. The Druids worshipped Nature in the beauty of her 

 works and the sublimity of her wonders. They taught of infinite 

 power and intelligence, for their knowledge of causes and effects in 

 the physical world told them that blind chance or fabled divinity, 

 was incapable of creating and maintaining the order of the universe. 

 In their sacred groves and sylvan temples, they saw displayed the 

 calm loveliness of nature : in the foaming torrent and cloud-capped 

 mountain they beheld her grandeur. 



There is perhaps nothing which more expands the mind and gives 

 it more exalted ideas of the vast immensity and sublimity of creation, 

 than the contemplation of mountain scenery. Whether we survey 

 the towering peaks of the Andes with their snow-clad summits, 

 which seem to pierce the azure vault, and form mighty links be- 

 tween the expansive heaven and the fruitful earth : whether we 

 survey the abrupt escarpment of the Himalaya range, down which 

 the eye vainly seeks a resting place and the brain becomes dizzy 

 with the dreary depths or the overhanging precipices : and whether 

 we survey the ice-bound pinnacles of the Alps, the undulatory 

 slopes of the Appenines, or the pine-clothed heights of the Dofra 

 Fell — in them all we behold the same omnipotent hand which 

 moulded into shape whatever is, and placed the mountains on the 

 earth as seals to hold together all the various parts, to poise and 

 balance it as swift it whirls through boundless space. Such reflec- 

 tions cannot fail to show to man his own insignificance and the 

 littleness of all his works. What are the boasted Pyramids of 

 Egypt, or the far-famed palaces of Babylon ? Had the whole of 



