Tudalen:Cofiant a gweithiau Risiart Ddu o Wynedd.djvu/92

Oddi ar Wicidestun
Gwirwyd y dudalen hon

like Homer, could infuse poetical life into historical facts. Many great poets are good delineators of character; such was Tennyson in Claribel, Lilian, Ida, Psyche, Maud, Arthur, &c. Risiart Ddu also had great power to delineate character; and half a dozen of his best compositions are on great men. And the same Gladstone says that " this is the crowning gift of the poet—the power of conceiving and representing man."

He was a natural critic. His qualities as a poet; with his extensive general knowledge; his hawk-eyed keenness to find faults; and his inviolable conscientiousness, made him one of the best adjudicators in the whole land.

But above his laurels; and above all the learning and talents that, like flowers, adorned the path of his earthly career, he was a young man of spot less character; and a decided Christian. A responsible person in the "Herald Cymraeg" a few weeks alter his death wrote—"One who knew him well, who was for years in the same office with him, and that when he was in good health, said, that Risiart Ddu was the most pious young man he ever knew." But it seems that his religious experience broadened and deepened wonderfully in his last, years. A sister who nursed him by turns during his last sickness writes—"I wish I could picture him to you as he was during the last months of his life, after he had become purified through suffering. From what he himself said, he had, spiritually, attained to heights he knew not of when you and he were college-mates at Bala. He grew in Christian experience as a result of his affliction. One day he was pointing out to me the mine of Christian experience we possessed