364 
hours among rocks and clouds. 
spring, the majestic—the powerful—the expansive Severn, that reflects in it& 
stream the spires of Shrewsbury, Worcester, and Gloucester, and on whose 
splendid estuary the fleets of India repose after their voyage to the isles of the 
new world—the Severn! on whose banks Hotspur and 44 Harry the king” at 
Shrewsbury, Edward and Margaret at Tewkesbury, and Charles and Crom¬ 
well at Worcester, have fought, and dyed the fields and the waters with gore— 
the Severn! on whose shore the roofs of Berkeley have rung with the shrieks of 
an agonizing king—here has its origin. The Severn, renowned in legendary and 
poetical lore, here has its outlet into the world. Sabrina, 44 virgin daughter of 
Locrine,” is here made goddess of the river, and 
“ By the Rushy-fringed bank” 
here takes her stand with her rustic urn, amidst clouds, tempests, and continued 
rain, winging the thought to Comus and his 44 monstrous rout,” and Ludlow’s 
. massy towers; and preparing, as her subject tributaries defile from their Spongy 
morasses, to pour with her increasing waters commerce, enterprise, the fruits of 
industry and the stores of trade upon her tidal wave. 
Several other rivers issue from the deep recesses of Plinlimmon, of which the 
Wye and the Rhydol are the most remarkable. The former weeps from a 
desolate turbary among the southern ravines of the mountain, and, joined by a 
hundred nameless prills, gallops madly into the vales of Radnor, spinning round 
and round in long circuits with the rrlost exuberant and playful wildness. 
The Rhydol flows more soberly from a small lake in a punch-bowl hollow, sur¬ 
rounded by black precipices on every side but the one that opens to admit the 
vagrant stream, that soon enters upon a short but most romantic course into 
the sea at Aberystwith, mingling in its way with the foaming waters of the 
Monach in the profound abyss below the Devil’s Bridge. The scenery about the 
head of the Rhydol pool is the most striking in the Plinlimmon defiles, the 
frowning rocks dripping with moisture, verdant with Mosses and Saxifrages, 
rearing their craggy masses almost perpendicularly, and throwing the lake they 
surround into the deepest and blackest shadow. 
In a hollow at the northern base of the mountain is a winding lake of dreary 
and desolate aspect, called the Begalyn Pool. It receives a number of plashy 
rills into its embrace from the redundancy of the weeping Mosses above it, and in 
its turn pours forth a stream that becomes a tributary to the Severn below Llanid¬ 
loes. A mass of black rocks hem it in on one side, with a rocky inlet a short 
distance in advance of them, torn doubtless from their embrace by some elemental 
crash. Trailing along the margin of the shallow waters of the Llyn near its head 
I noticed an abundant growth of the curious little Ranunculus reptans. There 
is an anecdote respecting this Begalyn Pool, which, as it bears upon the changes 
