Could not be granted even by yourselves;
Unless the looking on my face confirms
All I would say. Yes! sickness of the mind

Alone could render me insensible

To your affectionate words: but there are moods
Which turn away even from affection's tears;
From the inward feeling of our hopelessness.
Such have been mine: you see the end is near:
I read the truth in your prophetic looks.
When I am gone, the faith I had in you,
You will feel proved in my Confessions here.
I could not pass away unheard, and die,
The infinite oppression on my heart
Untold to human ears; oh! I have felt,
Rather than this, I must pour forth my story
To stones and echoless Nature. We may live,
Or breathe, without the human sympathies;
But we yearn, madden for them, ere we die!
I have bent o'er these records day and night,
Never more satisfied than picturing
Myself in darkest hues. I have been mad,
And felt that I was mad-a separate being,
In an existence from myself apart;

But conscience, the soul's voice, for ever watchful,
Ever presided o'er my agonies,

Approving what I suffered.

Much of this

May be too manifold within these scrolls,

Yet nothing I would change: no weaker words
Could paint the images I had to tell.

You I have chosen my Confessor-hear me !

All

you could say to comfort me I know.

And I have felt-how-words could not disclose.
I feel myself from earthlier taints absolved;
Suffering has purified: my heart has been
The Altar-place, consumed beneath th' ordeal;
But faith and hope, no phantoms of the mind,
But palpable Angels hovering over me,
Have told me of a life of peace hereafter:
That my immortal soul shall sleep not here!
Take these scrolls, and do with them as you list:
The name of her who acted still must be
Unknown;-a name is but a word, a sound :
The life, a warning is to those who yield
To the unreinèd passions of the heart;
To overwrought belief, and love, and hope,
Anger, revenge, and jealousy, and despair:
The fatal paths such torches guide us to,
Lighting up scenes where but remorse could follow,
With retributive justice felt even here.

The last request I ask, which courtesy
Or your affection will accord to me,
However painful, is, that we now part:
My gratefulness I feel I could not tell;
My life I leave, here, to your charities.'
She touched a silver bell: th' Attendant came;
And, ere we found accordance of reply,
She, with a gesture full of mournful sweetness,
Had left us, led, as one who suffered pain;
The door between us closed-I felt for ever.
She died her last request that solemn rites
Of Holy Church should be performed for her,
But with no stone to show where she was laid.
Th' Attendant followed to her resting-place,
Rigid in grief, as marble motionless.

Nothing from her stern silence could be wrung.
The after morn she left the cottage; all
The adornments and the moveables untouched,
Save that one picture and the crucifix ;
We felt she left it--never to return."

Erratum in No. DXLVIII.-Page 146, line 16, for how and then, read now and then.

BIOGRAPHICAL RECREATIONS.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH

RICHTER.

DEATH.

WHEN war furrows our globe with his ant or mole plough, and, with a nation-cleaving ploughshare, overturns, crushes and carries away the ant-hills we call cities, we are almost ashamed to note the wounds of any individual ant, or, on the banks of the blood-streams, to measure, by D. Glaser's blood-balance, the drops of blood we ourselves are losing. But of what, after all, do these streams consist, but of the drops of single wounds? Do not all the hammers of the war-forge descend ever on single hearts—a hammer on each heart? Besides, if, in time of war, the number of the wretched is to prevent my sympathising with individuals, I must be equally unsympathising at all times; for I have a battle-field before me, whenever I compress the space which every hour strews with the countless sighs and wounds of humanity.

Condemn, not, therefore, thou who, perhaps at this moment, beholdest the thousand-scythed chariot of war rolling down the mountain, amid the children and the mothers who lie in its precipitous path; in thy lovely grief, condemn not the ceaseless, in which thou art now to behold a daughter beside her dead mother-Adeline beside Julia.

The second apoplectic stroke announced itself by the softened heartnerves, which fell, sheathless and exposed, into the claws of sorrow. The preparations for the voyage were for her last; every open jewelcase reminded her of the now mouldering finger on which she had

placed the first ring of love; every faded dress was a garment of her former lovely spring, still floating aloft, but rapidly sinking into the flood of time; every dream beheaded her husband; and one morning, ere she was yet half awake, as she looked on the pale sun rising in the direction of Paris, and surrounded by ruddy clouds, and thought it was his pale head swimming in blood, her own turned giddy, and stiffened, and her spirit, rising into æther, beheld the earth afar off, bearing round the sun the ruins of its prostrate dungeon.

When Adeline looked on the corpse, it seemed as though there glided out of it an ice-cold grief, like a cold serpent twining itself round her heart, and sucked her heart dry-then swelled it with hot poison, until it hung, faded and drooping, voided and parched, on the viper rings and the poisoned fangs. In vain, poor Lismore, thou offerest the soothing balm of consolation-she cannot take it—she is not disobedient, but deaf to consolation. Oh leave me, pale image!

Thou afflictest me, as I afflict others, too deeply !-Why are my frequent resolves to paint grief in feebler tints and with less background, always in vain ? Do I not remember that a superior mind, like a high-priest, should bear no sorrow; and that while, on the one hand, I and my readers make so light of some of fortune's thefts (the stealing of our hair, for instance, of our cups, of our bread, our fruit and our honour), we yet, on the other, are but too easily melted by her stealing of men and corpses? Ah, but I also remember, that this grief is but a nobler love, a gentler suffering. And how can I restrain my imagination, when it shows me the crape-shrouded Adeline bitterly lamenting that the apoplexy stiffened the tongue sooner than the heart of her mother? and saying-"Ah, she would have spoken to me, and could not!" Of all laments, this affects me most-when I hear that, like a whirlwind, Death hath torn away a loved one without permitting adieus which, whether words or looks, would have been long and fondly remembered; for when the willow planted on his grave shall be dead -when the mourning-dresses shall be worn out-when only the yearly celebration of the death-day shall moisten the eye with a fleeting tear -even then, the thought, "He departed in silence, and could not bid farewell," must ever cause a bitter, burning pang. But thou, unhappier still, whose loved one vanishes in the death-cloud far from thee! No years will bring thee consolation. And therefore, when a stranger is buried among you, place over his remains, not the horizontal cross which is so soon overgrown, but a wooden or a metal cross with the register of his name and age; that so, if he have a friend, a brother, a father, who cannot forget him, and who, with the sole end of beholding the tomb, the abode, the covering of the loved breast now for ever buried, is making the mournful pilgrimage to his grave, he may find, among the wilderness of dead, the dead he seeks. And when the purpose of his pilgrimage is accomplished, and he has departed with assuaged grief, no matter, then, if the iron crucifix fall, the metal inscription become obliterated, and the grave-mound level.-Ah, it is a life-long affliction to think, as I must " Thy grave, like that of one buried in the sea, has no token !"

When Julia-who bloomed even in her coffin, like a gathered rose— was at length finally severed from her daughter, who, compared with

the corpse looked like a snow-white rose;-willingly did the inconsolable, with two tresses, which, amid a thousand tears, she had taken from the coffined head, bid adieu to her mother country. The reason why she thus willingly wandered forth is peculiar in a foreign land she might wear mourning for her mother. Thou dear Blonde! (but Nature did not intend thee only to mourn!) Black becomes blondes, and Fate clothes thee in mourning, as we set the diamond in ivory-black. But thou hast forgotten thy charms and thy love; and thy lover, could he remind thee of them, would be unworthy of both. Adeline longed to be in Scotland; for there the Count's sister was waiting for her; and an orphaned daughter lays her lacerated heart on a female, rather than on a male, breast. Lismore tarried not; for the knells of so many guiltless ones, tolling in every French city, racked Adeline's nerves beyond endurance. Much-tried France! mistrust not the future, while the hurricane is hurling all manner of poisonous sea-monsters from the slime of thy wide ocean, as storms strew the shore, not with amber only, but with poisonous fishes also. But how sad was the sight, when Lismore, like a dolphin, bore his loved one out of these bloody waves, over to the second free coast! Adeline, who now for the first time experienced the grief of leaving her native land and two dear graves, went, as soon as she was on board, into perpetual mourning. Ah, she found it so hard a thing to live! Vain were it to warn her that she is blinding her eyes, already dim with weeping. Does not her soul, like one that is departed, hover continually over the grave of the best of mothers? Ah, is it not just midway in her career (her twenty-third year scarcely past) that she has been forsaken by her guide, who, like the fellow traveller of young Tobias (but earlier), has been transformed into an ascending angel! -Alone, and in the night, thou standest before the moon, which swims in the waves, as thine eyes swim in tears-weary and motionless, (that thou mayest avoid consolation,) thou strainest thine eyes towards the land thou canst never forget-thy grief is bearing thee along the ascent of its heavenward path-thou gazest, without ceasing, towards the heart that has vanished behind the stars.-Ah, thou fair mourner! who that has followed a funeral wreath-who could blame, who even interrupt thee?

C. T. W.

LIFE IS A DREAM.

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH OF CALDERON.

BY JOHN OXENFORD.

(Continued from page 270.)

ACT II.

SCENE I.-A Chamber in the Royal Palace.

Enter the KING and CLOTALDO.

Clotaldo.
King.

All is as thou hast ordered.

Tell me then,

Clotaldo.

Clotaldo, how it happened?

It was done,
Sire, by the soothing draught prescribed by thee,
And which, replete with subtle drugs, combines
The many properties of various herbs.
These, with tyrannic power, with secret art,
Do so impede the human intellect,

That man remains nought but a living corpse,
His faculties and senses lulled to sleep.
We need not prove that this is possible,
Seeing experience has already taught us,
That medicine can reveal strange mysteries,
And that each min'ral, plant, and animal,
Possesses its determined quality.
If, too, our human malice can succeed,
In finding out a thousand deadly poisons,
Why may we not find those of lesser force,
That do not kill, but merely lull to sleep?
Ceasing to doubt that this was possible,-
As 'tis indeed most surely proved by reason,-
I took the liquor, which I had prepared,
Mixing together poppies, opium, henbane,
And visited the cell of Sigismund.

There I discoursed awhile of human learning,

Which the dumb nature of the skies and hills

Had taught him; while he learned in the same school

The simple eloquence of birds and brutes.

To raise his spirit to the high emprize,
Which thou desirest, as my theme I chose
The daring swiftness of a royal eagle,
Which, spurning the low region of the winds,

Rose to the highest spheres, an unreined comet,