The sun doth uplift his magnificent head,
And illumines the moon, which were otherwise dead,
Even as Wealth from its station on high,
Giveth work and provision to Poverty.
POVERTY
I know, and the thought mighty sorrow instils,
The sins of the world are the terrible hills
An eclipse which do cause, or a dread obscuration,
To one or another in every vocation.
RICHES
It is true that God gives unto each from his birth
Some task to perform while he wends upon earth,
But He gives correspondent wisdom and force
To the weight of the task, and the length of the course.
[Exit.
POVERTY
I hope there are some, who 'twixt me and the youth
Have heard this discourse, whose sole aim is the truth,
Will see and acknowledge, as homeward they plod,
Each thing is arrang'd by the wisdom of God.
There can be no doubt that Tom was a poet, or he could never have
treated the hackneyed subjects of Riches and Poverty in a manner so
original and at the same time so masterly as he has done in the
interlude above analyzed: I cannot, however, help thinking that he
was greater as a man than a poet, and that his fame depends more on
the cleverness, courage and energy, which it is evident by his
biography that he possessed, than on his interludes. A time will
come when his interludes will cease to be read, but his making ink
out of elderberries, his battle with the "cruel fighter," his
teaching his horses to turn the crane, and his getting the ship to
the water, will be talked of in Wales till the peak of Snowdon
shall fall down.
CHAPTER LXI
Set out for Wrexham - Craig y Forwyn - Uncertainty - The Collier -
Cadogan Hall - Methodistical Volume.
HAVING learnt from a newspaper that a Welsh book on Welsh Methodism
had been just published at Wrexham, I determined to walk to that
place and purchase it. I could easily have procured the work
through a bookseller at Llangollen, but I wished to explore the
hill-road which led to Wrexham, what the farmer under the Eglwysig
rocks had said of its wildness having excited my curiosity, which
the procuring of the book afforded me a plausible excuse for
gratifying. If one wants to take any particular walk it is always
well to have some business, however trifling, to transact at the
end of it; so having determined to go to Wrexham by the mountain
road, I set out on the Saturday next after the one on which I had
met the farmer who had told me of it.
