m the
bridegroom," sighed the unfortunate man, and fell away as he stood,
until nothing remained but a small heap of earth.[143]

Every reader of Longfellow loves the story of the Monk Felix, so
exquisitely told in "The Golden Legend." Its immediate source I do not
know; but it is certain that the tradition is a genuine one, and has
obtained a local habitation in many parts of Europe. Southey relates it
as attached to the Spanish convent of San Salvador de Villar, where the
tomb of the Abbot to whom the adventure happened was shown. And he is
very severe on "the dishonest monks who, for the honour of their convent
and the lucre of gain, palmed this lay (for such in its origin it was)
upon their neighbours as a true legend." In Wales, the ruined monastery
at Clynnog-Fawr, on the coast of Carnarvonshire, founded by St. Beuno,
the uncle of the more famous St. Winifred, has been celebrated by a
Welsh antiquary as the scene of the same event, in memory whereof a
woodland patch near Clynnog is said to be called Llwyn-y-Nef, the Grove
of Heaven. At Pantshonshenkin, in Carmarthenshire, a youth went out
early one summer's morning and was lost. An old woman, Catti Madlen,
prophesied of him that he was in the fairies' power and would not be
released until the last sap of a certain sycamore tree had dried up.
When that time came he returned. He had been listening all the while to
the singing of a bird, and supposed only a few minutes had elapsed,
though, seventy years had in fact gone over his head. In the Mabinogi of
Branwen, daughter of Llyr, Pryderi and his companions, while bearing the
head of Bran the Blessed, to bury it in the White Mount in London, were
entertained seven years at Harlech, feasting and listening to the
singing of the three birds of Rhiannon--a mythical figure in whom
Professor Rhys can hardly be wrong in seeing an old Celtic goddess. In
Germany and the Netherlands the story is widely spread. At the abbey of
Afflighem, Fulgentius, who was abbot towards the close of the eleventh
century, received the announcement one day that a stranger monk had
knocked at the gate and claimed to be one of the brethren of that
cloister. His story was that he had sung matins that morning with the
rest of the brotherhood; and when they came to the verse of the 90th
Psalm where it is said: "A thousand years in Thy sight are but as
yesterday," he had fallen into deep meditation, and continued sitting in
the choir when the others ha