THE ORIGIN OR INVENTION OF LETTERS IS A SUBJECT that has frequently engaged the attention and researches of learned men, and as often defied their power to explain, with any considerable amount of probability and satisfaction. The several alphabets of the known world, indeed, exhibit that mutual similarity of form, which fully warrants them in assigning to the whole class one common source; but that source is apparently sought for in every place except where, we are persuaded, it can alone be found.
It has been very much the fashion hitherto to depreciate the literature and traditions of the Cymry; yet we can confidently assert that in them lie treasures which would amply compensate for any amount of trouble that may be taken in arriving at them. The patient and-impartial study of Welsh lore will assuredly tend to throw no inconsiderable light upon the science and mythology of all nations.
Even the sacred Tetragrammaton of the Hebrews, taken by itself, is perfectly inexplicable—we cannot see how it represents the great I AM, and wherefore it is invested with extraordinary terror—or why it may not be pronounced or revealed. But the origin and reason of all this are discovered to us in the Bardic traditions. There we learn that God created the world by the melodious threefold utterance of His Holy Name—and that the form or figure of that Name was /1\ , being the rays of the rising sun at the equinoxes and the solstices converging into a focus—“the eye of light.” These rays, we are informed, according to the influence which the sun has upon the earth at the different seasons which they represent, show God in His various characters as a Creator, a Preserver, and a Destroyer.
