And crook-back Cecil's ever earthward eyes
Watching the glass in which the sands run low;
But deem not fondly there

To weep the fate or pour th' averting prayer
Have come those solemn spies!

Lo, at the regal gate

The impatient couriers wait;

To speed from hour to hour the nice account That registers the grudged unpitied sighs

Which yet must joy delay, before

The Stuart's tottering step shall mount

The last great Tudor's throne, red with his mother's gore!

IV.

Oh piteous mockery of all pomp thou art,
Poor child of clay, worn out with toil and years!
As, layer by layer, the granite of the heart
Dissolving, melteth to the weakest tears
That ever village maiden shed above
The grave that robb'd her quiet world of love.
Ten days and nights upon that floor
Those weary limbs have lain ;

And every hour but added more
Of heaviness to pain.

As gazing into dismal air

She sees the headless phantom there,
The victim round whose image twined
The last wild love of womankind;
That love which, in its dire excess,
Will blast where it can fail to bless,
And, like the lightning, flash and fade
In gloom along the ruins it has made.
'Twere sad to see from those stern eyes
Th' unheeded anguish feebly flow;
And hear the broken word that dies
In moanings faint and low;

But sadder still to mark, the while,
The vacant stare, the marble smile,
And think, that goal of glory won,
How slight a shade between
The idiot moping in the sun
And England's giant queen!*

"It was after labouring for nearly three weeks under a morbid melancholy, which brought on a stupor not unmixed with some inM

V.

Call back the gorgeous past!

Lo, England white-robed for a holyday!

While, choral to the clarion's kingly blast,

Peals shout on shout along the virgin's way;
As through the swarming streets rolls on the long array.
Mary is dead! Look from your fire-won homes,
Exulting martyrs! on the mount shall rest

Truth's ark at last! th' avenging Lutheran comes
And clasps THE BOOK ye died for to her breast!*
With her, the flower of all the land,

The highborn gallants ride,
And, ever nearest of the band,
With watchful eye and ready hand,

Young Dudley's form of pride!†

Ah, ev'n in that exulting hour

Love half allures the soul from power,
And blushes, half-suppressed, betray
The woman's hope and fear;
Like blooms which in the early May
Bud forth beneath a timorous ray,
And mark the mellowing year,
While steals the sweetest of all worship, paid
Less to the monarch than the maid,

Melodious on the ear!

dications of a disordered fancy, that the queen expired.-Aikin's translation of a Latin letter (author unknown) to Edmund Lambert. Robert Čarey, who was admitted to an interview with Elizabeth in her last illness, after describing the passionate anguish of her sighs, observes, "that, in all his lifetime before, he never knew her fetch a sigh but when the Queen of Scots was beheaded." Yet this Robert Carey, the well-born mendicant of her bounty, was the first whose eager haste and joyous countenance told James that the throne of the Tudors was at last vacant.

"When she (Elizabeth) was conducted through London amid the joyful acclamations of her subjects, a boy, who personated Truth, was let down from one of the triumphal arches, and presented to her a copy of the Bible. She received the book with the most gracious deportment, placed it next her bosom," &c.--Hume.

Robert Dudley, afterward the Leicester of doubtful fame, attended Elizabeth in her passage to the Tower. The streets, as she passed along, were spread with the finest gravel; banners and pennons, hangings of silk, of velvet, of cloth of gold, were suspended from the balconies, musicians and singers were stationed amid the populace, as she rode along in her purple robes, preceded by her heralds, &c.

VI.

Call back the gorgeous past!

The lists are set, the trumpets sound,
Bright eyes, sweet judges, throned around;
And stately on the glittering ground

The old chivalric life!

“Forward.”* The signal word is given;
Beneath the shock the greensward shakes;
The lusty cheer, the gleaming spear,
The snow-plume's falling flakes,

The fiery joy of strife!

Thus, when, from out a changeful heaven
O'er waves in eddying tumult driven
A stormy smile is cast,

Alike the gladsome anger takes
The sunshine and the blast!

Who is the victor of the day?

Thou of the delicate form, and golden hair,
And manhood glorious in its midst of May;
Thou who upon thy shield of argent bearest
The bold device, "The loftiest is the fairest!"
As bending low thy stainless crest,
"The vestal throned by the west"
Accords the old Provençal crown

Which blends her own with thy renown;
Arcadian Sidney, nursling of the muse,
Flower of fair chivalry, whose bloom was fed
With daintiest Castaly's most silver dews,

Alas! how soon thy amaranth leaves were shed; Born, what th' Ausonian minstrel dream'd, to bef Time's knightly epic pass'd from earth with thee!

VII.

Call back the gorgeous past!

Where, bright and broadening to the main,
Rolls on the scornful river;

Stout hearts beat high on Tilbury's plain,
Our Marathon for ever!

*The customary phrase was "Laissez aller."

+ What difference between the Tancred of Tasso and the Sidney of England, except that the last was of bone and flesh? "The Life of Sir Philip Sidney," as Campbell finely expresses it," was poetry put in action." With him died the Provençal and the Norman, the ideal of the middle ages.

No breeze above, but on the mast
The pennon shook as with the blast.
Forth from the cloud the day-god strode,
O'er bristling helms the splendour glow'd,
Leap'd the loud joy from earth to heaven,
As, through the ranks asunder riven,

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The warrior-woman rode!

Hark, thrilling through the armèd line
The martial accents ring,

Though mine the woman's form, yet mine
"The heart of England's king!"*
Wo to the island and the maid!

The pope has preach'd the new crusade,†
His sons have caught the fiery zeal;
The monks are merry in Castile;
Bold Parma on the main;

And through the deep exulting sweep-
The thunder-steeds of Spain.‡

What meteor rides the sulphurous gale?
The flames have caught the giant sail!
Fierce Drake is grappling prow to prow;
God and St. George for victory now!
Death in the battle and the wind;
Carnage before and storm behind;

Wild shrieks are heard above the hurtling roar
By Orkney's rugged strands and Erin's ruthless shore.
Joy to the island and the maid!

Pope Sixtus wept the last crusade;
His sons consumed before his zeal
The monks are woful in Castile;

"I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England too."-Elizabeth's harangue at Tilbury Camp.

She rode bareheaded through the ranks, a page bearing her helmet, mounted on a war-horse, clad in steel, and wielding a general's truncheon in her hand. Nothing in Napoleon's speeches excels the simple and grand eloquence of her imperishable address to her soldiery.

"Sextus Quintus, the present pope, famous for his capacity and his tyranny, had published a crusade against England, and had granted plenary indulgences to every one engaged in the present invasion."-Hume. This pope was nevertheless Elizabeth's admirer as well as foe, and said, not very clerically, "If a son could be born from us two, he would be master of the world."

"Steeds of the sea" was the poetic synonyme for ships with the old Runic bards.

Your monument the main,
The glaive and gale record your tale,
Ye thunder-steeds of Spain!

VIII.

Turn from the gorgeous past;
Its lonely ghost thou art!
A tree, that, in a world of bloom,
Droops, spectral in its leafless gloom,
Before the griding blast;

But art thou fallen then so low?
Art thou so desolate? wan shadow, No!

Crouch'd, suppliant by the grave's unclosing portal,
Love, which proclaims thee human, bids thee know
A truth more lofty in thy lowliest hour

Than shallowest glory taught to deafen'd power, "WHAT'S HUMAN IS IMMORTAL!"

"Tis sympathy which makes sublime!
Never so reverent in thy noon of time

As now, when o'er thee hangs the midnight pall;
No comfort, pomp; and wisdom no protection;

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Hope's cloud-capp'd towers and solemn temples"

gone

Mid memory's wrecks, eternal and alone;

Type of the woman-deity AFFECTION;

That only Eve which never knew a fall,

Sad as the dove, but, like the dove, surviving all!

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