Days come and go of gloom and show. Seven years are past and gone. Marlotes in his joy and pride a target high doth rear, Below the Moorish knights must ride and pierce it with the spear; No Moorish lance may fly so far, Marlotes' prize to gain. Wroth waxed King Marlotes when he beheld them fail, The whisker trembled on his lip, and his cheek for ire was pale. The heralds proclamation made, with trumpets, through the town, "Nor child shall suck, nor man shall eat, till the mark be tumbled down!" The cry of proclamation and the trumpet's haughty sound Did send an echo to the vault where the Admiral was bound. "Now help me, God!" the captive cries. "What means this cry so loud? O, Queen of Heaven! be vengeance given on these thy haters proud! "Oh! is it that some Paynim gay doth Marlotes' daughter wed, And that they bear my scorned fair in triumph to his bed? Or is it that the day is come-one of the hateful three When they, with trumpet, fife, and drum, make heathen game of me?" These words the jailer chanced to hear, and thus to him he said: "This is the joyful morning of John the Baptist's day, When Moor and Christian feasts at home, each in his nation's way; Then out and spoke Guarinos: "Oh! soon each man should feed, Oh, were I mounted as of old, and harnessed cap-a-pie, "Give me my horse, my old gray horse, so be he is not dead, The jailer wondered at his words. Thus to the knight said he: The jailer put his mantle on and came unto the king, That were he mounted but once more on his own gallant gray, Much marvelling, then said the king: "Bring Sir Guarinos forth, His arms are rusty on the wall; seven years have gone, I judge, "Now this will be a sight indeed to see the enfeebled lord Essay to mount that ragged steed, and draw that rusty sword; They have girded on his shirt of mail, his cuisses well they've clasped, And they've barred the helm on his visage pale, and his hand the lance hath grasped; And he stands pawing at the gate, caparisoned once more. When the knight came out the Moors did shout, and loudly laughed the King, For the horse he pranced and capered and furiously did fling: But Guarinos whispered in his ear, and looked into his face, Then stood the old charger like a lamb, with calm and gentle grace. Oh! lightly did Guarinos vault into the saddle-tree, And slowly riding down made halt before Marlotes' knee; Again the heathen laughed aloud. "All hail, Sir Knight!" quoth he, With that Guarinos, lance in rest, against the scoffer rode, CERVANTES.-Translated by J. G. Lockhart. SPRING. Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year's pleasant king; The palm and may make country houses gay, The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet, THOMAS NASH (1600). 1 Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are supposed to have heard this ballad sung by peasants on their way to work at daybreak The number of characteristic sones contained in the great book of Cervantes are frequently overlooked in the delight with which we follow the adventures of the hero, THE LOST COLONY. Although now consisting of little else than barren rocks, mountains covered with snow and ice, and valleys covered with glaciers, although its coasts are now lined with floods of ice, and chequered with icebergs of immense size, Greenland was once easily accessible; its soil was fruitful, and well repaid the cultivation of the earth. It was discovered by the Scandinavians, towards the close of the tenth century, and a settlement was effected on the eastern coast, in the year 982, by a company of adventurers from Iceland, under command of Eric the Red. Emigrants flocked thither from Iceland and Norway, and the results of European enterprise and civilization appeared on different parts of the coast. A colony was established in Greenland, and it bid fair to go on and prosper. Voyages of exploration were projected in Greenland, and carried into effect by the hardy mariners of those days. Papers have been published by the Danish Antiquarian Society at Copenhagen, which go far to show that those bold navigators discovered the coast of Labrador, and proceeding to the south, fell in with the Island of Newfoundland; continuing their course, they beheld the sandy shores of Cape Cod, centuries before the American continent was discovered by Christopher Columbus! It is even believed that these Scandinavian adventurers effected a settlement on the shores of what is now known as Narraganset Bay, in Rhode Island, and in consequence of the multitude of grapes which abounded in the woods, they called the new and fruitful country Vinland. But owing to the great number of hostile savages who inhabited these regions, the colonists, after some sanguinary skirmishes, forsook the coast and returned to Greenland. The colony, however, continued to flourish, and the intercourse between it and the mother country was constant and regular. In the year 1400 it is said to have numbered one hundred and ninety villages, a bishopric, twelve parishes, and two monasteries. During this period of four hundred years, vessels were passing, at regular intervals, between the Danish provinces in Europe and Greenland. But in the year 1406 this intercourse was interrupted in a fatal manner. A mighty wall arose, as if by magic, along the coast, and the navigators who sought those shores could behold the mountains in the distance, but could not effect a landing. During the greater part of the fifteenth, the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Greenland was inaccessible to European navigators. The whole coast was blockaded by large masses and islands of ice, which had been drifting from the north for years, and which at length chilled the waters of the coast, and changed the temperature of the atmosphere, and presented an impassible barrier to the entrance in their ports of friend or foe. The sea, at the distance of miles from the land, was frozen to a great depth, vegetation was destroyed, and the very rocks were rent with the cold. And this intensely rigid weather continued for ages! The colony of Greenland, after this unexpected event took place, never had any intercourse with their friends in the mother country. They were cut off from all the rest of the world. And by this sudden and unanticipated change of climate they were also doubtless deprived of all resources within themselves. Their fate, however, is a mystery. History is silent on the subject. All which is known of this unfortunate people is, that they no longer exist. The ruins of their habitations and their churches have since been discovered along the coast by adventurous men, who have taken advantage of an amelioration in the climate to explore that sterile country, and establish settlements again on various parts of the coast; and also by missionaries, who have braved hardships and perils to introduce among the aboriginal inhabitants the blessings of civilization and Christianity. No other traces of those early European settlers have been discovered, and we can only speculate upon their fate. It would require no vivid fancy to imagine the appalling sense of destitution which blanched the features and chilled the hearts of those unhappy colonists when they began to realize their forlorn condition; when the cold rapidly increased, and their harbours became permanently blocked with enormous icebergs, and the genial rays of the sun were obscured by fogs; when the winters became for the first time intensely rigid, cheerless, and dreary; when the summers were also cold, and the soil unproductive; when the mountains, no longer crowned with forests, were covered with snow and ice throughout the year, and the valleys filled with glaciers; when the wonted inhabitants of the woods and waters were destroyed or exiled by the severity of the weather, and their places perhaps supplied by monsters of a huge and frightful character. It were easy to follow this people in fancy to their dwellings; to see them sad, spiritless, and despairing, while conscious of their im prisoned and cheerless condition, and impending fate; to watch them as their numbers gradually diminish through the combined influence of want and continual suffering; to behold them struggling for existence, and striving, nobly striving, to adapt their constitutions, their habits, their feelings, and their wants, to their strangely changed circumstances, but all in vain; to behold them gazing from their icy cliffs, with straining eyes, to the eastward, towards that quarter of the globe, so far distant, where their friends and relations reside, in a more genial clime, surrounded with all the blessings of life, but compelled to rest their eyes on a vast, dreary, and monotonous sea of ice, a mass of frozen waves, surrounding myriads of icebergs, extending to the utmost limit of their vision. Fancy might even go farther than this, and portray the last of these unhappy colonists, who had lingered on the stage of life until he had seen all of his companions, all, of each sex and every age, die a miserable death, the prey of want and despair. Poets have described, in lines of beauty and sublimity, the horrors which may be supposed to surround "the last man;" but there seems to be a remoteness, and indeed an air of improbability about the subject, which robs it of half its force and majesty. But here is an event which has actually occurred, and worthy of being commemorated by the ablest pen in the land. Here, indeed, we may imagine, without offending probability, the wild horrors, invading the very temple of reason, and accumulating, until madness takes possession of the mind. Here we may look for the reality of the fanciful picture, presented with so much terrible distinctness by the poets. JOHN S. SLEEPER. YOU'LL COME TO OUR BALL.1 You'll come to our ball?-Since we parted, For a week when they took you away Which you used to sing to me then. 1 This is the first of the "Letters from Teignmonth," which are amongst the best of Praed's Vers-de-Société. It's only a year since, at college, You put on your cap and your gown; But, Clarence, you're grown out of knowledge, And changed from the spur to the crown: The voice that was best when it faltered Is fuller and firmer in tone; And the smile that should never have alter'd,— Your cravat was badly selected, You must have it curled for our Ball. I've often been out upon Haldon, I've ridden the filly you broke; Perhaps, if you'll come to our Ball. You'll find us all changed since you vanished: Miss Hyacinth threatens a rout: The walk is laid down with fresh gravel; And Anne has gone off with Sir Paul; And I'll tell you the rest at the Ball. You'll meet all your Beauties;-the Lily, And the Fairy of Willowbrook Farm, And Lucy, who made me so silly At Dawlish, by taking your arm: Miss Manners, who always abused you For talking so much about hock; And her sister, who often amused you By raving of rebels and Rock; And something which surely would answer An heiress, quite fresh from Bengal; So, though you were seldom a dancer, You'll dance, just for once, at our Ball. But out on the world!-from the flowers Like a streamlet beginning to freeze, Though it cannot turn ice in a minute, Grow harder by sullen degrees. The Chevalier de Boufflers, whom Delile characterized as "the honour of knighthood and the flower of Troubadours," the erotic poet, the agreeable novelist, so long the delight of the salons of Paris, was by turns an abbot, a colonel of hussars, a painter, an academician, a legislator, and, under all these characters, the most gay, careless, and witty of French cavaliers. I was long acquainted with this highly gifted man. I saw him in 1780 at the beautiful estate of Chanteloup, near Amboise, whither the Duke de Choiseul, then an exile from the court, attracted many of the most distinguished men of France, whether for birth or merit. It was the focus of the most brilliant wits and beauties of the day. The Duchess de Choiseul, whose memory is still cherished on the lovely banks of the Loire, had a friendship for the Chevalier de Boufflers which did her honour: he was her companion in her walks, in the VOL. III. chase, and still more frequently in her visits to the cottages of the peasantry, to whom this accomplished and excellent woman constantly administered comfort and assistance. Madame de Choiseul was, in her youth, intimate with Buffon, from whom she had imbibed a strong taste for the observation of natural objects. Her library contained a complete collection of natural historians, ancient and modern. This delightful and exhaustless study had inspired Madame de Choiseul with a new and fanciful idea. Opposite to the windows of her own room she had erected a temple of gauze of antique form, and sheltered by an ample roof; during the summer she amused herself with collecting in this airy palace all the most beautiful butterflies of the country. The Duchess alone had a key of the Temple of Butterflies, which was peopled by the assiduity of the village girls of the neighbourhood. They strove, by presenting to her continually some new species, to obtain the privilege of speaking to their beloved patroness, and they were sure to receive a reward proportioned to the beauty and rarity of their offerings. Boufflers was frequently a witness to the duchess's assiduous cares about her favourite temple. "Chevalier," said she to him, with a smile, "I run no risk in introducing you among my butterflies; they will take you for one of themselves, and will not be frightened." On one occasion, when Madame de Choiseul was compelled by illness to keep her room for some weeks, she gave the key of her temple to the chevalier, who found ample compensation for the trouble of his charge in the pleasure of receiving the country girls who daily came to recruit the numerous family of butterflies. He encouraged them to talk about their rural sports and their love affairs, so that he was soon master of the chronicles of all the surrounding villages. In this way he frequently caught ideas and expressions with which he afterwards adorned his poems. It was, however, remarked that Boufflers almost always preferred the butterflies brought by the prettiest girls: his scrutiny turned rather upon their features, their natural and simple graces, than upon the objects it was his office to select. An engaging face, a graceful carriage, or a well-turned person, was pretty sure not to be rejected. Thus the beautiful temple declined in splendour, but fewer poor little girls went away disappointed; and the duchess's bounty, passing through the easy hands of the chevalier, was diffused more widely, and glad dened more hearts. 54 |