Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/9

 THE MEMORY OF THE KYMRIC DEAD.

FEW, if any, races are so touched and awed by the enigmas of life and the mysteries that encircle our being as are the Celts. No races revel more in the joys of life, in the charms of nature and its delights, and in the pleasures of social intercourse. No races ponder so much over the doom pronounced upon man:—" Yet shall he be brought to the grave and shall remain in the tomb. The clods of the valley shall be sweet unto him, and every man shall draw after him, as there are innumerable before him."

You have witnessed or read of funeral customs among many peoples and in varied climes, but the description in Ecclesiastes,— "man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets," is picturesquely true of Welsh funerals. The large concourse at a Welsh funeral is not alone an exhibition of neighbourliness and