ELAN LAKES— WILD SOUTH WALES 



Wales, more beautiful. Shelley came here after his 

 expulsion from Oxford, and the rupture of his engage- 

 ment with his cousin Harriet Grove, whose family 

 had some land here, and the consequent row with his 

 wholly unsympathetic father. It was from Cwm Elan 

 in 1811 he wrote consenting to elope with Harriet 

 Westbrook, and it was to Nantgwillt that he brought 

 her in 181 2. And, as I have said, you may to-day, 

 uncanny though the thought of it, catch trout over 

 the very rooms which witnessed the transient loves of 

 the poet and his doomed wife, and aU thereto pertain- 

 ing which, with the tragic sequel, have exercised so 

 many pens and fascinated thousands of readers. 



Yet more, perhaps it was in these submerged walls 

 that the boyish poet wrote the very first stanzas of that 

 immortal treasury of song which have been preserved 

 to us. It was his first acquaintance, at any rate, with 

 the sublime in nature. His letters glow with the 

 divine glories of the spot, as well they may, and end 

 with curses on its distance from a post-office. His 

 first solitary summer here saw him in the depths of 

 despondency ; his second, newly wedded and in the 

 heights of bliss. As a blithe bridegroom at Nant- 

 gwillt he recalls his former melancholy at Cwm Elan 

 as a jilted lover, a disgraced son, and an expelled 

 undergraduate. 



A scene which wildered fancy viewed 



In the soul's coldest solitude, 



With that same scene when peaceful love 



Flings rapture's colour o'er the grove ; 



When mountain, meadow, wood, and stream 



With unalloying glory gleam, 



N 193 



