II.

But she with queenliest grace, bent low her pallid face, And, "Woo me not for Jesus' sake, fair gentlemen," she said.

If they woo'd, then, with a frown she would strike their

sion down:

pas

She might have wed a crown to the ringlets on her head.

III.

From the dizzy castle-tips, hour by hour she watched the ships,

Like sheeted phantoms coming and going evermore, While the twilight settled down on the sleepy seaport-town, On the gables peaked and brown, that had sheltered kings

of yore.

IV.

Dusky belts of cedar-wood partly clasped the widening flood;

Like a knot of daisies lay the hamlets on the hill;

In the hostelry below, sparks of light would come and go, And faint voices strangely low, from the garrulous old

mill.

V.

Here the land in grassy swells gently broke; there sunk in

dells

With mosses green and purple, and prongs of rock and

peak;

Here in statue-like repose, an old wrinkled mountain rose, With its hoary head in snows, and wild roses at its feet.

VI.

And so oft she sat alone in the turret of gray stone,

And looked across the moorland, so woful, to the sea, That there grew a village-cry, how her cheek did lose its dye,

As a ship, once, sailing by, faded on the sapphire lea.

THE LADY OF CASTLENORE.

45

VII.

Her few walks led all one way, and all ended at the gray And ragged, jagged rocks that fringe the lonesome beach; There she would stand, the Sweet! with the white surf at her feet,

While above her wheeled the fleet sparrow-hawk with startled screech.

VIII.

And she ever loved the sea, God's half-uttered mystery,
With its million lips of shells, its never-ceasing roar;
And 'twas well that, when she died, they made her a grave

beside

The blue pulses of the tide, by the towers of Castlenore.

IX.

Now, one chill November morn, many russet autumns gone, A strange ship with folded wings lay dozing off the lea; It had lain throughout the night with its wings of murky white

Folded, after weary flight, the worn nursling of the sea.

X.

Crowds of peasants flocked the sands, there were tears and clasping hands;

And a sailor from the ship stalked through the kirk-yard

gate;

Then amid the grass that crept, fading over her who slept, How he hid his face and wept, crying, Late, alas! too late!

XI.

And they called her cold. God knows. Underneath the winter snows,

The invisible hearts of flowers grow ripe for blossoming! And the lives that look so cold, if their stories could be told, Would seem cast in gentler mould, would seem full of love and spring.

T. B. ALDRICH.

Note 18.

THE EARL OF CHATHAM.

CHATHAM, at the time of his decease, had not in both Houses of Parliament ten personal adherents. Half the public men of the age had been estranged from him by his errors, and the other half by the exertions he had made to repair his errors. But death restored him to his old place in the affection of his country. Who could hear unmoved of the fall of that which had been so great and had stood so long? The circumstances, too, seemed rather to belong to the tragic stage than to real life. A great statesman, full of years and honors, led forth to the Senate House by a son of rare hopes, and stricken down in full council while straining his feeble voice to rouse the drooping spirit of his country, could not but be remembered with peculiar veneration and tenderness. The few detractors who ventured to murmur, were silenced by the indignant clamors of a nation which remembered only the lofty genius, the unsullied probity, the undisputed services of him who was no more. For once all parties were agreed. A public funeral, a public monument were eagerly voted. The debts of the deceased were paid. The city of London requested that the remains of the great man whom she had so long loved and honored, might rest under the dome of her magnificent cathedral. But the petition came too late. Everything was already prepared for the interment in Westminster Abbey.

Chatham sleeps near the northern door of the church, in a spot which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the other end of the same transept has been to poets. Mansfield rests there, and the second William Pitt, and Fox, and Grattan, and Canning, and Wilberforce. In no other cemetery do so many great citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over those venerable graves towers the stately monument of Chatham, and from above, his effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face

WENDELL PHILLIPS' FIRST CLIENT.

47

and outstretched arm, to bid England to be of good cheer, and hurl defiance at her foes. The generation which reared that memorial of him has disappeared. The time has come when the rash and indiscriminate judgments which his contemporaries passed on his character may be calmly reviewed by history. And history, while, for the warning of vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors, will yet deliberately pronounce that among the eminent men whose bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless, and none a more splendid name.

MACAULAY.

Note 19.

WENDELL PHILLIPS' FIRST CLIENT.

THE time during which Phillips was studying law, was the hour of the profoundest moral apathy in the history of this country. The fervor of revolutionary feeling was long since spent, and that of the final anti-slavery contest was but just kindled. The question of slavery, indeed, had never been quite forgotten. There was always an antislavery sentiment in the country; but there was also a slavery interest, and the invention of the cotton-gin in 1789 gave slavery the most powerful and insidious impulse that it had ever received. At once commercial greed was allied with political advantage and social power, and the active anti-slavery sentiment rapidly declined. When Wendell Phillips was admitted to the bar in 1834, the slave interest in the United States, entrenched in the Constitution, in trade, in the Church, in society, in historic tradition, and in the prejudice of race, had already become, although unconsciously to the country, one of the most powerful forces in the world. The grasp of England upon the American Colonies before the Revolution was not so sure, and was never so menacing to liberty upon this continent, as the grasp of slavery upon the Union in the pleasant days when the young

lawyer sat in his office, careless of the anti-slavery agitation, and jesting with his old college comrades over the clients who did not come.

He

But in an October afternoon in 1835, while he was still sitting expectant in his office, the long-waited client came; but in what amazing form! The young lawyer was especially a Boston boy. He loved his native city with that lofty pride and intensity of local affection which is peculiar to her citizens. "I was born in Boston," he said, long afterward, " and the good name of the old town is bound up with every fibre of my heart." In the mild afternoon his windows were open, and the sound of unusual disturbance drew him from his office. He hastened along the street, and suddenly, a stone's throw from the scene of the Boston massacre, in the very shadow of the Old South, he beheld, in Boston, a spectacle which Boston cannot now conceive. He saw American women insulted for befriending their innocent sisters, whose children were sold from their arms. saw an American citizen assailed by a furious mob in the city of James Otis, for saying, with James Otis, that a man's right to liberty is inherent and inalienable. Himself a citizen soldier, he looked to see the majesty of the people maintaining the authority of law; but, to his own startled surprise, he saw that the rightful defenders of law against the mob were themselves the mob. The city, whose dauntless free speech had taught a country how to be independent, he saw raising a parricidal hand against its parent—Liberty. It was enough. As the jail doors closed upon Garrison to save his life, Garrison and his cause had won their most powerful and renowned ally. With the setting of that October sun vanished forever the career of prosperous ease, the gratification of ordinary ambition which the genius and the accomplishment of Wendell Phillips had seemed to foretell. Yes, the long-awaited client had come at last. Scarred, scorned, and forsaken, that cowering and friendless client was wronged and degraded humanity. The great soul saw and understood.