The Argosy — page 139: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Round about Barmouth, 129 its surface: except now and then as a slight breeze passed over and gently ruffled it, and the sunbeams kissed its bosom in millions of golden gleam-like flashes, which glittered and sparkled, and threw their glamour over these hoary battlements. What easy and pleasant work to loynge on the top of that ancient ruin and dream away hours and days : surrounded with rast histories in which to read up, and grow familiar with, all the characters with whom the thought of the country is ever inseparable: who have made themselves a place in the world’s annals : who were loved or feared, as the case might be, in their day and generation ; a day to them of power, of lust, of craft, of oppression, of tenderness, of forbearance. They have had their day; a day now misty with age and the uncertainty of what was and what was not? Owain GLENDOWR’s HoUusE, DOLGELLY, ‘7 and their great deeds and great ambitions, weakened as they are by the lapse of centuries, seem to us of no more weight or moment than the play of a child who plants his footprint upon the sand, to watch its obliteration by the next advancing wave. Yet in those old days those warriors, men and women, gazed upon this scene and found it exactly as it is to-day, in all but the ruins of the old castle. If we are to believe history, on this very site stood a castle more than thirteen hundred years ago. The castle now in ruins is said to have been built in the reign of Edward I., from designs of Henri de Ellerton. In 1404, Owain Glendowr obtained possession of the fortress, but was turned out of it by Prince Henry. In 1468, the Earl of Pembroke besieged it under the order of King Edward. At this siege that well-known march of the “ Men of Harlech” was composed ; a march to which the present words were written by the VOL, XIX. I comicbooks.com