" So he opened the door and looked towards Cornwall and Aber
Henvelen. And when they had looked, they were as conscious of all
the evils they had ever sustained, and of all the friends and
companions they had lost, and of all the misery that had befallen
them, as if all had happened in that very spot; and especially of the
fate of their lord. And because of their perturbation they could not
rest, but journeyed forth with the head towards London. And they
buried the head in the White Mount.'
Arthur afterwards, in his pride and self-confidence, disinterred the
head, and this was one of 'the three unhappy disclosures of the
island of Britain.'
There is evidently mixed here, with the newer legend, a detritus, as
the geologists would say, of something far older; and the secret of
Wales and its genius is not truly reached until this detritus,
instead of being called recent because it is found in contact with
what is recent, is disengaged, and is made to tell its own story.
But when we show him things of this kind in the Welsh remains, Mr.
Nash has an answer for us. 'Oh,' he says, 'all this is merely a
machinery of necromancers and magic, such as has probably been
possessed by all people in all ages, more or less abundantly. How
similar are the creations of the human mind in times and places the
most remote! We see in this similarity only an evidence of the
existence of a common stock of ideas, variously developed according
to the formative pressure of external circumstances.
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