Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 08

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Title: Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 08

Editor: Charles Dudley Warner
Hamilton Wright Mabie
Lucia Gilbert Runkle
George H. Warner

Release date: August 9, 2010 [eBook #33385]
Most recently updated: January 6, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33385

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Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIBRARY OF THE WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE, ANCIENT AND MODERN — VOLUME 08 ***

Produced by Juliet Sutherland and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

LIBRARY OF THE
WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE
ANCIENT AND MODERN

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

EDITOR

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE
GEORGE HENRY WARNER

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Connoisseur Edition

VOL. VIII.

NEW YORK
THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY

Connoisseur Edition

LIMITED TO FIVE HUNDRED COPIES IN HALF RUSSIA

_No_. ..........

THE ADVISORY COUNCIL

CRAWFORD H. TOY, A. M., LL. D.,
Professor of Hebrew, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Cambridge, Mass.

THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY, LL. D., L. H. D.,
Professor of English in the Sheffield Scientific School of
YALE UNIVERSITY, New Haven, Conn.

WILLIAM M. SLOANE, PH. D., L. H. D.,
Professor of History and Political Science,
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, Princeton, N. J.

BRANDER MATTHEWS, A. M., LL. B.,
Professor of Literature, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, New York City.

JAMES B. ANGELL, LL. D.,
President of the UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, Ann Arbor, Mich.

WILLARD FISKE, A. M., PH. D.,
Late Professor of the Germanic and Scandinavian Languages
and Literatures, CORNELL UNIVERSITY, Ithaca, N. Y.

EDWARD S. HOLDEN, A. M., LL. D.,
Director of the Lick Observatory, and Astronomer,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Berkeley, Cal.

ALCEE FORTIER, LIT. D.,
Professor of the Romance Languages,
TULANE UNIVERSITY, New Orleans, La.

WILLIAM P. TRENT, M. A.,
Dean of the Department of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of
English and History, UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH, Sewanee, Tenn.

PAUL SHOREY, PH. D.,
Professor of Greek and Latin Literature,
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, Chicago, Ill.

WILLIAM T. HARRIS, LL. D.,
United States Commissioner of Education,
BUREAU OF EDUCATION, Washington, D. C.

MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, A. M., LL. D.,
Professor of Literature in the
CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA, Washington, D. C.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

VOL. VIII

LIVED PAGE
JOHN CALVIN 1509-1564 3117
BY ARTHUR CUSHMAN McGIFFERT
Prefatory Address to the 'Institutes'
Election and Predestination ('Institutes of the Christian
Religion')
Freedom of the Will (same)

LUIZ VAZ DE CAMOENS 1524?-1580 3129
BY HENRY R. LANG
From 'The Lusiads'
The Canzon of Life
Adieu to Coimbra

THOMAS CAMPBELL 1777-1844 3159
Hope ('The Pleasures of Hope')
The Fall of Poland (same)
The Slave (same)
Death and a Future Life (same)
Lochiel's Warning
The Soldier's Dream
Lord Ullin's Daughter
The Exile of Erin
Ye Mariners of England
Hohenlinden
The Battle of Copenhagen
From the 'Ode to Winter'

CAMPION -1619 3184
BY ERNEST RHYS
A Hymn in Praise of Neptune
Of Corinna's Singing
From 'Divine and Moral Songs'
To a Coquette
Songs from 'Light Conceits of Lovers'

GEORGE CANNING 1770-1827 3189

Rogero's Soliloquy ('The Rovers')
The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder
On the English Constitution ('Speech on Parliamentary Reform')
On Brougham and South America

CESARE CANTU 1807-1895 3199

The Execution ('Margherita Pusterla')

GIOSUE CARDUCCI 1835- 3209
BY FRANK SEWALL
Roma ('Poesie')
Homer ('Levia Gravia')
In a Gothic Church ('Poesie')
On the Sixth Centenary of Dante ('Levia Gravia')
The Ox ('Poesie')
Dante ('Levia Gravia')
To Satan ('Poesie')
To Aurora ('Odi Barbare')
Ruit Hora
The Mother

THOMAS CAREW 1589?-1639 3221

A Song
The Protestation
Song
The Spring
The Inquiry

EMILIA FLYGARE-CARLEN 1807-1892 3225

The Pursuit of the Smugglers ('Merchant House among the
Islands')

THOMAS CARLYLE 1795-1881 3231
BY LESLIE STEPHEN
Labor ('Past and Present')
The World in Clothes ('Sartor Resartus')
Dante ('Heroes and Hero-Worship')
Cromwell (same)
The Procession ('French Revolution')
The Siege of the Bastille (same)
Charlotte Corday (same)
The Scapegoat (same)

BLISS CARMAN 1861- 3302
BY CHARLES G.D. ROBERTS
Hack and Hew
At the Granite Gate
A Sea Child

LEWIS CARROLL (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) 1833- 3307

Alice, the Pig-Baby, and the Cheshire Cat ('Alice in
Wonderland')
The Mock Turtle's Education (same)
A Clear Statement (same)
The Walrus and the Carpenter ('Through the Looking-Glass')
The Baker's Tale ('Hunting of the Snark')
You are Old, Father William ('Alice in Wonderland')

CASANOVA (De Seingalt) 1725-1803 3321

Casanova's Escape from the Ducal Palace ('Escapes of
Casanova and Latude from Prison')

BARTOLOMEO DE LAS CASAS 1474-1566 3333

Of the Island of Cuba ('A Relation of the First Voyage')

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE 1478-1529 3339

Of the Court of Urbino ('Il Cortegiano')

CATO THE CENSOR 234-149 B.C. 3347

On Agriculture ('De Agricultura')
From the 'Attic Nights' of Aulus Gellius

JACOB CATS 1577-1660 3353

Fear after the Trouble
"A Rich Man Loses his Child, a Poor Man Loses his Cow"

CATULLUS 84-54 B.C.? 3359
BY J. W. MACKAIL
Dedication for a Volume of A Brother's Grave
Lyrics
A Morning Call
Home to Sirmio
Heart-Break
To Calvus in Bereavement
The Pinnace
An Invitation to Dinner
Farewell to His Fellow Officers
Verses from an Epithalamium
Love is All
Elegy on Lesbia's Sparrow
"Fickle and Changeable Ever"
Two Chords
Last Word to Lesbia

BENVENUTO CELLINI 1500-1571 3371

The Escape from Prison
The Casting of Perseus
A Necklace of Pearls
Benvenuto Loses his Brother
An Adventure in Necromancy
Benvenuto Loses Self-Control under Severe Provocation
(All the above are from Cellini's 'Memoirs,'
Symonds's Translation)

CELTIC LITERATURE 3403
BY WILLIAM SHARP AND ERNEST RHYS
I--IRISH
The Miller of Hell
Signs of Home
Oisin in Tirnanoge
From 'The Coming of Cuculain'
The Mystery of Amergin
The Song of Fionn
Vision of a Fair Woman
From 'The Wanderings of Oisin'
The Madness of King Goll
II--SCOTTISH
St. Bridget's Milking Song
Prologue to Gaul
Columcille Fecit
In Hebrid Seas
III--WELSH
IV--CORNISH
From 'The Poem of the Passion'
From 'Origo Mundi,' in the 'Ordinalia'

CERVANTES 1547-1616 3451
BY GEORGE SANTAYANA
Treating of the Character and Pursuits of Don Quixote
Of What Happened to Don Quixote when he Left the Inn
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Sally Forth: and the
Adventure with the Windmills
Sancho Panza and his Wife Teresa Converse Shrewdly
Of Sancho Panza's Delectable Discourse with the Duchess
Sancho as Governor
The Ending of All Don Quixote's Adventures

FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME VIII

PAGE
Miniature Painting of the Middle Ages (Colored Plate) Frontispiece
John Calvin (Portrait) 3118
The Septuagint (Fac-simile) 3124
Luiz Vaz de Camoens (Portrait) 3130
"Hohenlinden" (Photogravure) 3178
"Homer" (Photogravure) 3209
Thomas Carlyle (Portrait) 3232
"Charlotte Corday in Prison" (Photogravure) 3290
Benvenuto Cellini (Portrait) 3374
Cervantes (Portrait) 3464

VIGNETTE PORTRAITS

Thomas Campbell
George Canning
Emilia Flygare-Carlen
Bliss Carman
Bartolorneo de las Casas
Baldassare Castiglione
Jacob Cats
Valerius Catullus

JOHN CALVIN

(1509-1564)

BY ARTHUR CUSHMAN McGIFFERT

John Calvin was born in the village of Noyon, in northeastern France,
on the 10th of July, 1509. He was intended by his parents for the
priesthood, for which he seemed to be peculiarly fitted by his
naturally austere disposition, averse to every form of sport or
frivolity, and he was given an excellent education with that calling
in view; but finally at the command of his father--whose plans for his
son had undergone a change--he gave up his theological preparation and
devoted himself to the study of law. Gifted with an extraordinary
memory, rare insight, and an uncommonly keen reasoning faculty, he
speedily distinguished himself in his new field, and a brilliant
career was predicted for him by his teachers. His tastes however were
more literary than legal, and his first published work, written at the
age of twenty-three, was a commentary on Seneca's 'De Clementia,'
which brought him wide repute as a classical scholar and as a clear
and forceful writer.

Though he had apparently renounced forever all thoughts of a clerical
life, he retained, even while he was engaged in the study of law and
in the more congenial pursuit of literature, his early love for
theology; and in 1532, under the influence of some of Luther's
writings which happened to fall into his hands, he was converted to
the Protestant faith and threw in his fortunes with the little
evangelical party in Paris. His intellectual attainments made him a
marked man wherever he went, and he speedily became the leading spirit
in the circle to which he had attached himself. Compelled soon
afterward by the persecuting measures of King Francis I. to flee the
country, he took up his residence at Basle and settled down, as he
hoped, to a quiet literary life. It was during his stay here that he
published in 1536 the first edition of his greatest work, 'The
Christian Institutes,' in which is contained the system of theology
which has for centuries borne his name, and by which he is best known
to the world at large. Probably no other work written by so young a
man has ever produced such a wide-spread, profound, and lasting
influence. In its original form, it is true, the work was only a brief
and simple introduction to the study of the Scriptures, much less
imposing and forbidding than the elaborate body of divinity which is
now known to theologians as 'Calvin's Institutes': but all the
substance of the last edition is to be found in the first; the
theology of the one is the theology of the other--the Calvin of 1559
is the Calvin of 1536. The fact that at the age of twenty-six Calvin
could publish a system of theology at once so original and so
profound--a system, moreover, which with all his activity of intellect
and love of truth he never had occasion to modify in any essential
particular--is one of the most striking phenomena in the history of
the human mind; and yet it is but one of many illustrations of the
man's marvelous clearness and comprehensiveness of vision, and of his
force and decision of character. His life from beginning to end was
the consistent unfolding of a single dominant principle--the
unwavering pursuit of a single controlling purpose. From his earliest
youth the sense of duty was all-supreme with him; he lived under a
constant imperative--in awe of, and in reverent obedience to, the will
of a sovereign God; and his theology is but the translation into
language of that experience; its translation by one of the world's
greatest masters of logical thought and of clear speech.

Calvin's great work was accompanied by a dedicatory epistle addressed
to King Francis I., which is by common consent one of the finest
specimens of courteous and convincing apology in existence. A brief
extract from it will be found in the selections given below.

Soon after the publication of the 'Institutes,' Calvin's plans for a
quiet literary career were interrupted by a peremptory call to assist
in the work of reforming the Church and State of Geneva; and the
remainder of his life, with the exception of a brief interval of
exile, was spent in that city, at the head of a religious movement
whose influence was ultimately felt throughout all Western Europe.
It is true that Calvin was not the originating genius of the
Reformation--that he belonged only to the second generation of
reformers, and that he learned the Protestant faith from Luther.
But he became for the peoples of Western Europe what Luther was for
Germany, and he gave his own peculiar type of Protestantism--that type
which was congenial to his disposition and experience--to Switzerland,
to France, to the Netherlands, to Scotland, and through the Dutch, the
English Puritans, and the Scotch Presbyterians, to large portions of
the New World. Calvin, to be sure, is not widely popular to-day even
in those lands which owe him most, for he had little of that human
sympathy which glorifies the best thought and life of the present age;
but for all that, he has left his mark upon the world, and his
influence is not likely ever to be wholly outgrown. His emphasis upon
God's holiness made his followers scrupulously, even censoriously
pure; his emphasis upon God's will made them stern and unyielding in
the performance of what they believed to be their duty; his emphasis
upon God's majesty, paradoxical though it may seem at first sight,
promoted in no small degree the growth of civil and religious liberty,
for it dwarfed all mere human authority and made men bold to withstand
the unlawful encroachments of their fellows. Thus Calvin became a
mighty force in the world, though he gave the world far more of law
than of gospel, far more of Moses than of Christ.

[Illustration: JOHN CALVIN.]

Calvin's career as a writer began at an early day and continued until
his death. His pen was a ready one and was seldom idle. In the midst
of the most engrossing cares and occupations--the cares and
occupations of a preacher, a pastor, a teacher of theology, a
statesman, and a reformer to whom the Protestants of many lands looked
for inspiration and for counsel--he found time, though he died at the
early age of fifty-four, to produce works that to-day fill more than
threescore volumes, and all of which bear the unmistakable impress of
a great mind. In addition to his 'Institutes,' theological and ethical
tracts, and treatises, sermons, and epistles without number, he wrote
commentaries upon almost all the books of the Bible; which for
lucidity, for wide and accurate learning, and for sound and ripe
judgment, have never been surpassed. Among the most characteristic and
important of his briefer works are his vigorous and effective 'Reply
to Cardinal Sadolet,' who had endeavored after Calvin's exile from
Geneva in 1539 to win back the Genevese to the Roman Church; his tract
on 'The Necessity of Reforming the Church; presented to the Imperial
Diet at Spires, A.D. 1544, in the cause of all who wish with Christ
to reign'--an admirable statement of the conditions which had made a
reformation of the Church imperatively necessary, and had led to the
great religious and ecclesiastical revolution; another tract on 'The
True Method of Giving Peace to Christendom and Reforming the
Church,'--marked by a beautiful Christian spirit and permeated with
sound practical sense; still another containing 'Articles Agreed Upon
by the Faculty of Sacred Theology at Paris, with the Antidote', and
finally an 'Admonition Showing the Advantages which Christendom might
Derive from an Inventory of Relics.' Though Calvin was from boyhood up
of a most serious turn of mind, and though his writings, in marked
contrast to the writings of Luther, exhibit few if any traces of
genial spontaneous humor, the last two works show that he knew how to
employ satire on occasion in a very telling way for the overthrow of
error and for the discomfiture of his opponents.

In addition to the services which Calvin rendered by his writings to
the cause of Christianity and of sacred learning, must be recognized
the lasting obligation under which as an author he put his mother
tongue. Whether he wrote in Latin or in French, his style was always
chaste, elegant, clear, and vigorous. His Latin compares favorably
with the best models of antiquity; his French is a new creation. The
latter language indeed owes almost as much to Calvin as the German
language owes to Luther. He was unquestionably its greatest master in
the sixteenth century, and he did more than any one else to fix its
permanent character--to give it that exactness, that lucidity, that
purity and harmony of which it justly boasts.

Calvin's writings bear throughout the imprint of his character. There
appears in all of them the same horror of impurity and dishonor, the
same stern sense of duty, the same respect for the sovereignty of the
Almighty, the same severe judgment of human failings. To read them is
to breathe the tonic air of snow-clad heights; but they are seldom if
ever touched with the tender glow of human feeling or transfigured
with the radiance of creative imagination. There is that in David, in
Isaiah, in Paul, in Luther, which appeals to every heart and makes
their words immortal; but Calvin was neither poet nor prophet,--the
divine afflatus was not his,--and it is not without reason that his
writings, vigorous, forceful, profound, as is their context, and pure
and elegant as is their style, are read to-day only by theologians or
historians.

[Signature: Arthur Cushman McGiffert]

PREFATORY ADDRESS TO THE 'INSTITUTES'

TO FRANCIS, KING OF THE FRENCH, the most Christian Majesty,
the most Mighty and Illustrious Monarch, his Sovereign,--John
Calvin prays peace and salvation in Christ.

_Sire:_--When I first engaged in this work, nothing was further from
my thoughts than to write what should afterwards be presented to your
Majesty. My intention was only to furnish a kind of rudiments, by
which those who feel some interest in religion might be trained to
true godliness. And I toiled at the task chiefly for the sake of my
countrymen the French, multitudes of whom I perceived to be hungering
and thirsting after Christ, while very few seemed to have been duly
imbued with even a slender knowledge of him. That this was the object
which I had in view is apparent from the work itself, which is written
in a simple and elementary form, adapted for instruction.

But when I perceived that the fury of certain bad men had risen to
such a height in your realm that there was no place in it for sound
doctrine, I thought it might be of service if I were in the same work
both to give instruction to my countrymen, and also lay before your
Majesty a Confession, from which you may learn what the doctrine is
that so inflames the rage of those madmen who are this day with fire
and sword troubling your kingdom. For I fear not to declare that what
I have here given may be regarded as a summary of the very doctrine
which, they vociferate, ought to be punished with confiscation, exile,
imprisonment, and flames, as well as exterminated by land and sea.

I am aware indeed how, in order to render our cause as hateful to your
Majesty as possible, they have filled your ears and mind with
atrocious insinuations; but you will be pleased of your clemency to
reflect that neither in word nor deed could there be any innocence,
were it sufficient merely to accuse. When any one, with the view of
exciting prejudice, observes that this doctrine of which I am
endeavoring to give your Majesty an account has been condemned by the
suffrages of all the estates, and was long ago stabbed again and again
by partial sentences of courts of law, he undoubtedly says nothing
more than that it has sometimes been violently oppressed by the power
and faction of adversaries, and sometimes fraudulently and insidiously
overwhelmed by lies, cavils, and calumny. While a cause is unheard, it
is violence to pass sanguinary sentences against it; it is fraud to
charge it, contrary to its deserts, with sedition and mischief.

That no one may suppose we are unjust in thus complaining, you
yourself, most illustrious Sovereign, can bear us witness with what
lying calumnies it is daily traduced in your presence; as aiming at
nothing else than to wrest the sceptres of kings out of their hands,
to overturn all tribunals and seats of justice, to subvert all order
and government, to disturb the peace and quiet of society, to abolish
all laws, destroy the distinctions of rank and property, and in short
turn all things upside down. And yet that which you hear is but the
smallest portion of what is said; for among the common people are
disseminated certain horrible insinuations--insinuations which, if
well founded, would justify the whole world in condemning the doctrine
with its authors to a thousand fires and gibbets. Who can wonder that
the popular hatred is inflamed against it, when credit is given to
those most iniquitous accusations? See why all ranks unite with one
accord in condemning our persons and our doctrine!

Carried away by this feeling, those who sit in judgment merely give
utterance to the prejudices which they have imbibed at home, and think
they have duly performed their part if they do not order punishment to
be inflicted on any one until convicted, either on his own confession,
or on legal evidence. But of what crime convicted? "Of that condemned
doctrine," is the answer. But with what justice condemned? The very
evidence of the defense was not to abjure the doctrine itself, but to
maintain its truth. On this subject, however, not a whisper is
allowed....

It is plain indeed that we fear God sincerely and worship him in
truth, since, whether by life or by death, we desire his name to be
hallowed; and hatred herself has been forced to bear testimony to the
innocence and civil integrity of some of our people, on whom death was
inflicted for the very thing which deserved the highest praise. But if
any, under pretext of the gospel, excite tumults (none such have as
yet been detected in your realm), if any use the liberty of the grace
of God as a cloak for licentiousness (I know of numbers who do), there
are laws and legal punishments by which they may be punished up to the
measure of their deserts; only in the mean time let not the gospel of
God be evil spoken of because of the iniquities of evil men.

Sire, that you may not lend too credulous an ear to the accusations of
our enemies, their virulent injustice has been set before you at
sufficient length: I fear even more than sufficient, since this
preface has grown almost to the bulk of a full apology. My object
however was not to frame a defense, but only with a view to the
hearing of our cause, to mollify your mind, now indeed turned away and
estranged from us,--I add, even inflamed against us,--but whose good
will, we are confident, we should regain, would you but once with
calmness and composure read this our Confession, which we desire your
Majesty to accept instead of a defense. But if the whispers of the
malevolent so possess your ear that the accused are to have no
opportunity of pleading their cause; if those vindictive furies, with
your connivance, are always to rage with bonds, scourgings, tortures,
maimings, and burnings--we indeed, like sheep doomed to slaughter,
shall be reduced to every extremity; yet so that in our patience we
will possess our souls, and wait for the strong hand of the Lord,
which doubtless will appear in its own time, and show itself armed,
both to rescue the poor from affliction and also take vengeance on the
despisers, who are now exulting so securely.

Most illustrious King, may the Lord, the King of kings, establish your
throne in righteousness and your sceptre in equity.

BASLE, August 1st, 1536.

ELECTION AND PREDESTINATION

From the 'Institutes of the Christian Religion'

The human mind when it hears this doctrine of election cannot restrain
its petulance, but boils and rages as if aroused by the sound of a
trumpet. Many, professing a desire to defend the Deity from an
invidious charge, admit the doctrine of election but deny that any one
is reprobated (Bernard, in 'Die Ascensionis,' Serm. 2). This they do
ignorantly and childishly, since there could be no election without
its opposite, reprobation. God is said to set apart those whom he
adopts for salvation. It were most absurd to say that he admits others
fortuitously, or that they by their industry acquire what election
alone confers on a few. Those therefore whom God passes by he
reprobates, and that for no other cause but because he is pleased to
exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines to his
children. Nor is it possible to tolerate the petulance of men in
refusing to be restrained by the word of God, in regard to his
incomprehensible counsel, which even angels adore.

We have already been told that hardening is not less under the
immediate hand of God than mercy. Paul does not, after the example of
those whom I have mentioned, labor anxiously to defend God by calling
in the aid of falsehood; he only reminds us that it is unlawful for
the creature to quarrel with its Creator. Then how will those who
refuse to admit that any are reprobated by God, explain the following
words of Christ? "Every plant which my heavenly Father hath not
planted shall be rooted up" (Matth. xv. 13). They are plainly told
that all whom the heavenly Father has not been pleased to plant as
sacred trees in his garden are doomed and devoted to destruction. If
they deny that this is a sign of reprobation, there is nothing,
however clear, that can be proved to them. But if they will still
murmur, let us in the soberness of faith rest contented with the
admonition of Paul, that it can be no ground of complaint that God,
"willing to show his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with
much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted for destruction: and
that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of
mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory" (Rom. ix. 22, 23). Let
my readers observe that Paul, to cut off all handle for murmuring and
detraction, attributes supreme sovereignty to the wrath and power of
God; for it were unjust that those profound judgments which transcend
all our powers of discernment should be subjected to our calculation.

It is frivolous in our opponents to reply that God does not altogether
reject those whom in lenity he tolerates, but remains in suspense with
regard to them, if peradventure they may repent; as if Paul were
representing God as patiently waiting for the conversion of those whom
he describes as fitted for destruction. For Augustine, rightly
expounding this passage, says that where power is united to endurance,
God does not permit, but rules (August. Cont. Julian., Lib. v., c. 5).
They add also, that it is not without cause the vessels of wrath are
said to be fitted for destruction, and that God is said to have
prepared the vessels of mercy, because in this way the praise of
salvation is claimed for God; whereas the blame of perdition is thrown
upon those who of their own accord bring it upon themselves. But were
I to concede that by the different forms of expression Paul softens
the harshness of the former clause, it by no means follows that he
transfers the preparation for destruction to any other cause than the
secret counsel of God. This indeed is asserted in the preceding
context, where God is said to have raised up Pharaoh, and to harden
whom he will. Hence it follows that the hidden counsel of God is the
cause of hardening. I at least hold with Augustine, that when God
makes sheep out of wolves he forms them again by the powerful
influence of grace, that their hardness may thus be subdued; and that
he does not convert the obstinate, because he does not exert that more
powerful grace, a grace which he has at command if he were disposed to
use it (August, de Praedest. Sanct., Lib. i., c. 2)....

[Illustration: _SEPTUAGINT._

Facsimile, somewhat reduced, of a page of the
VATICAN MANUSCRIPT.

Fourth Century. Vatican Library.

The Septuagint is the Greek translation, by seventy elders, of
the Hebrew Bible.

The earlier copies are all in uncial or "capital" letters,
cursive or "lower-case" letters being a later invention.

This is a good specimen of the hand-work of the ecclesiastical
scribes of the fourth century.]

Accordingly, when we are accosted in such terms as these: Why did God
from the first predestine some to death, when as they were not yet in
existence, they could not have merited sentence of death?--let us by
way of reply ask in our turn, What do you imagine that God owes to
man, if he is pleased to estimate him by his own nature? As we are all
vitiated by sin, we cannot but be hateful to God, and that not from
tyrannical cruelty, but the strictest justice. But if all whom the
Lord predestines to death are naturally liable to sentence of death,
of what injustice, pray, do they complain? Should all the sons of Adam
come to dispute and contend with their Creator, because by his eternal
providence they were before their birth doomed to perpetual
destruction: when God comes to reckon with them, what will they be
able to mutter against this defense? If all are taken from a corrupt
mass, it is not strange that all are subject to condemnation. Let them
not therefore charge God with injustice, if by his eternal judgment
they are doomed to a death to which they themselves feel that, whether
they will or not, they are drawn spontaneously by their own nature.
Hence it appears how perverse is this affectation of murmuring, when
of set purpose they suppress the cause of condemnation which they are
compelled to recognize in themselves, that they may lay the blame upon
God. But though I should confess a hundred times that God is the
author (and it is most certain that he is), they do not however
thereby efface their own guilt, which, engraven on their own
consciences, is ever and anon presenting itself to their view....

If God merely foresaw human events, and did not also arrange and
dispose of them at his pleasure, there might be room for agitating the
question, how far his foreknowledge amounts to necessity; but since he
foresees the things which are to happen, simply because he has decreed
that they are so to happen, it is vain to debate about prescience,
while it is clear that all events take place by his sovereign
appointment.

They deny that it is ever said in distinct terms, God decreed that
Adam should perish by his revolt. As if the same God who is declared
in Scripture to do whatsoever he pleases could have made the noblest
of his creatures without any special purpose. They say that, in
accordance with free will, he was to be the architect of his own
fortune; that God had decreed nothing but to treat him according to
his desert. If this frigid fiction is received, where will be the
omnipotence of God, by which, according to his secret counsel on which
everything depends, he rules over all? But whether they will allow it
or not, predestination is manifest in Adam's posterity. It was not
owing to nature that they all lost salvation by the fault of one
parent. Why should they refuse to admit with regard to one man that
which against their will they admit with regard to the whole human
race? Why should they in caviling lose their labor? Scripture
proclaims that all were, in the person of one, made liable to eternal
death. As this cannot be ascribed to nature, it is plain that it is
owing to the wonderful counsel of God. It is very absurd in these
worthy defenders of the justice of God to strain at a gnat and swallow
a camel. I again ask how it is that the fall of Adam involves so many
nations with their infant children in eternal death without remedy,
unless that it so seemed meet to God? Here the most loquacious tongues
must be dumb. The decree, I admit, is dreadful; and yet it is
impossible to deny that God foreknew what the end of man was to be
before he made him, and foreknew because he had so ordained by his
decree. Should any one here inveigh against the prescience of God, he
does it rashly and unadvisedly. For why, pray, should it be made a
charge against the heavenly Judge, that he was not ignorant of what
was to happen? Thus, if there is any just or plausible complaint, it
must be directed against predestination. Nor ought it to seem absurd
when I say that God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in
him the ruin of his posterity, but also at his own pleasure arranged
it. For as it belongs to his wisdom to foreknow all future events, so
it belongs to his power to rule and govern them by his hand.

FREEDOM OF THE WILL

From the 'Institutes of the Christian Religion'

God has provided the soul of man with intellect, by which he might
discern good from evil, just from unjust, and might know what to
follow or to shun, reason going before with her lamp; whence
philosophers, in reference to her directing power, have called her
[Greek: to hegemonichon]. To this he has joined will, to which
choice belongs. Man excelled in these noble endowments in his
primitive condition, when reason, intelligence, prudence, and judgment
not only sufficed for the government of his earthly life, but also
enabled him to rise up to God and eternal happiness. Thereafter choice
was added to direct the appetites and temper all the organic motions;
the will being thus perfectly submissive to the authority of reason.
In this upright state, man possessed freedom of will, by which if he
chose he was able to obtain eternal life. It were here unseasonable to
introduce the question concerning the secret predestination of God,
because we are not considering what might or might not happen, but
what the nature of man truly was. Adam, therefore, might have stood if
he chose, since it was only by his own will that he fell; but it was
because his will was pliable in either direction, and he had not
received constancy to persevere, that he so easily fell. Still he had
a free choice of good and evil; and not only so, but in the mind and
will there was the highest rectitude, and all the organic parts were
duly framed to obedience, until man corrupted its good properties, and
destroyed himself. Hence the great darkness of philosophers who have
looked for a complete building in a ruin, and fit arrangement in
disorder. The principle they set out with was, that man could not be a
rational animal unless he had a free choice of good and evil. They
also imagined that the distinction between virtue and vice was
destroyed, if man did not of his own counsel arrange his life. So far
well, had there been no change in man. This being unknown to them, it
is not surprising that they throw everything into confusion. But those
who, while they profess to be the disciples of Christ, still seek for
free-will in man, notwithstanding of his being lost and drowned in
spiritual destruction, labor under manifold delusion, making a
heterogeneous mixture of inspired doctrine and philosophical opinions,
and so erring as to both. But it will be better to leave these things
to their own place. At present it is necessary only to remember that
man at his first creation was very different from all his posterity;
who, deriving their origin from him after he was corrupted, received a
hereditary taint. At first every part of the soul was formed to
rectitude. There was soundness of mind and freedom of will to choose
the good. If any one objects that it was placed, as it were, in a
slippery position because its power was weak, I answer, that the
degree conferred was sufficient to take away every excuse. For surely
the Deity could not be tied down to this condition,--to make man such
that he either could not or would not sin. Such a nature might have
been more excellent; but to expostulate with God as if he had been
bound to confer this nature on man, is more than unjust, seeing he had
full right to determine how much or how little he would give. Why he
did not sustain him by the virtue of perseverance is hidden in his
counsel; it is ours to keep within the bounds of soberness. Man had
received the power, if he had the will, but he had not the will which
would have given the power; for this will would have been followed by
perseverance. Still, after he had received so much, there is no excuse
for his having spontaneously brought death upon himself. No necessity
was laid upon God to give him more than that intermediate and even
transient will, that out of man's fall he might extract materials for
his own glory.

LUIZ VAZ DE CAMOENS

(1524?-1580)

BY HENRY R. LANG

Portuguese literature is usually divided into six periods, which
correspond, in the main, to the successive literary movements of the
other Romance nations which it followed.

_First Period_ (1200-1385), Provencal and French influences. Soon
after the founding of the Portuguese State by Henry of Burgundy and
his knights in the beginning of the twelfth century, the nobles of
Portugal and Galicia, which regions form a unit in race and speech,
began to imitate in their native idiom the art of the Provencal
troubadours who visited the courts of Leon and Castile. This courtly
lyric poetry in the Gallego-Portuguese dialect, which was also
cultivated in the rest of the peninsula excepting the East, reached
its height under Alphonso X. of Castile (1252-84), himself a noted
poet and patron of this art, and under King Dionysius of Portugal
(1279-1325), the most gifted of all these troubadours. The collections
(_cancioneiros_) of the works of this school preserved to us contain
the names of one hundred and sixty-three poets and some two thousand
compositions (inclusive of the four hundred and one spiritual songs of
Alphonso X.). Of this body of verse, two-thirds affect the artificial
style of Provencal lyrics, while one-third is derived from the
indigenous popular poetry. This latter part contains the so-called
_cantigas de amigo_, songs of charming simplicity of form and
naivete of spirit in which a woman addresses her lover either in a
monologue or in a dialogue. It is this native poetry, still echoed in
the modern folk-song of Galicia and Portugal, that imparted to the
Gallego-Portuguese lyric school the decidedly original coloring and
vigorous growth which assign it an independent position in the
mediaeval literature of the Romance nations.

Composition in prose also began in this period, consisting chiefly in
genealogies, chronicles, and in translations from Latin and French
dealing with religious subjects and the romantic traditions of British
origin, such as the 'Demanda do Santo Graal.' It is now almost certain
that the original of the Spanish version of the 'Amadis de Gaula'
(1480) was the work of a Portuguese troubadour of the thirteenth
century, Joam de Lobeira.

_Second Period_ (1385-1521), Spanish influence. Instead of the
Provencal style, the courtly circles now began to cultivate the native
popular forms, the _copla_ and _quadra_, and to compose in the
dialect of Castile, which communicated to them the influence of the
Italian Renaissance, with the vision and allegory of Dante and a
fuller understanding of classical antiquity. These two literary
currents became the formative elements of the second poetic school of
an aristocratic character in Portugal, at the courts of Alphonse V.
(1438-1481), John II. (1481-95), and Emanuel (1495-1521), whose works
were collected by the poet Garcia de Resende in the 'Cancioneiro
Geral' (Lisbon, 1516).

The prose-literature of this period is rich in translations from the
Latin classics, and chiefly noteworthy for the great Portuguese
chronicles which it produced. The most prominent writer was Fernam
Lopes (1454), the founder of Portuguese historiography and the "father
of Portuguese prose."

_Third Period_ (1521-1580), Italian influence. This is the classic
epoch of Portuguese literature, born of the powerful rise of the
Portuguese State during its period of discovery and conquest, and of
the dominant influence of the Italian Renaissance. It opens with three
authors who were prominently active in the preceding literary school,
but whose principal influence lies in this. These are Christovam
Falcao and Bernardim Ribeiro, the founders of the bucolic poem and the
sentimental pastoral romance, and Gil Vicente, a comic writer of
superior talent, who is called the father of the Portuguese drama, and
who, next to Camoens, is the greatest figure of this period. Its real
initiator, however, was Francesco Sa' de Miranda (1495-1557) who, on
his return from a six-years' study in Italy in 1521, introduced the
lyric forms of Petrarch and his followers as the only true models for
composition. Besides giving by his example a classic form to lyrics,
especially to the sonnet, and cultivating the pastoral poem, Sa' de
Miranda, desirous of breaking the influence of Gil Vicente's dramas,
wrote two comedies of intrigue in the style of the Italians and of
Plautus and Terence. His attempts in this direction, however, found no
followers, the only exception being Ferreira's tragedy 'Ines de
Castro' in the antique style. The greatest poet of this period, and
indeed in the whole history of Portuguese literature, is Luiz de
Camoens, in whose works, epic, lyric, and dramatic, the cultivation of
the two literary currents of this epoch, the national and the
Renaissance, attained to its highest perfection, and to whom
Portuguese literature chiefly owes its place in the literature of the
world.

Among the works in prose produced during this time are of especial
importance the historical writings, such as the 'Decadas' of Joao de
Barros (1496-1570), the "Livy of Portugal" and the numerous romances
of chivalry.

[Illustration: LUIS DE CAMOENS.]

_Fourth Period_ (1580-1700), Culteranistic influence. The political
decline of Portugal is accompanied by one in its literature. While
some lyric poetry is still written in the spirit of Camoens, and the
pastoral romance in the national style is cultivated by some authors,
Portuguese literature on the whole is completely under the influence
of the Spanish, receiving from the latter the euphuistic movement,
known in Spain as _culteranismo_ or _Gongorismo_. Many writers of
talent of this time used the Spanish language in preference to their
own. It is thus that the charming pastoral poem 'Diana,' by Jorge de
Montemor, though composed by a Portuguese and in a vein so peculiar to
his nation, is credited to Spanish literature.

_Fifth Period_ (1700-1825), Pseudo-Classicism. The influence of the
French classic school, felt in all European literatures, became
paramount in Portugal. Excepting the works of a few talented members
of the society called "Arcadia," little of literary interest was
produced until the appearance, at the end of the century, of Francisco
Manoel de Nascimento and Manoel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, two poets of
decided talent who connect this period with the following.

_Sixth Period_ (since 1825), Romanticism. The initiator of this
movement in Portugal was Almeida-Garrett (1799-1854), with Gil Vicente
and Camoens one of the three great poets Portugal has produced, who
revived and strengthened the sense of national life in his country by
his 'Camoens,' an epic of glowing patriotism published during his
exile in 1825, by his national dramas, and by the collection of the
popular traditions of his people, which he began and which has since
been zealously continued in all parts of the country. The second
influential leader of romanticism was Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877),
great especially as national historian, but also a novelist and poet
of superior merit. The labors of these two men bore fruit, since the
middle of the century, in what may be termed an intellectual
renovation of Portugal which first found expression in the so-called
Coimbra School, and has since been supported by such men as Theophilo
Braga, F. Adolpho Coelho, Joaquim de Vasconcellos, J. Leite de
Vasconcellos, and others, whose life-work is devoted to the conviction
that only a thorough and critical study of their country's past can
inspire its literature with new life and vigor and maintain the sense
of national independence.

* * * * *

LUIZ VAZ DE CAMOENS, Portugal's greatest poet and patriot, was born in
1524 or 1525, most probably at Coimbra, as the son of Simao Vaz de
Camoens and Donna Anna de Macedo of Santarem. Through his father, a
_cavalleiro fidalgo_, or untitled nobleman, who was related with Vasco
da Gama, Camoens descended from an ancient and once influential noble
family of Galician origin. He spent his youth at Coimbra, and though
his name is not found in the registers of the university, which had
been removed to that city in 1537, and of which his uncle, Bento de
Camoens, prior of the monastery of Santa Cruz, was made chancellor in
1539, it was presumably in that institution, then justly famous, that
the highly gifted youth acquired his uncommon familiarity with the
classics and with the literatures of Spain, Italy, and that of his own
country. In 1542 we find Camoens exchanging his _alma mater_ for the
gay and brilliant court of John III., then at Lisbon, where his gentle
birth, his poetic genius, and his fine personal appearance brought him
much favor, especially with the fair sex, while his independent
bearing and indiscreet speech aroused the jealousy and enmity of his
rivals. Here he woos and wins the damsels of the palace until a
high-born lady in attendance upon the Queen, Donna Catharina de
Athaide,--whom, like Petrarch, he claims to have first seen on Good
Friday in church, and who is celebrated in his poems under the anagram
of _Natercia_,--inspires him with a deep and enduring passion.
Irritated by the intrigues employed by his enemies to mar his
prospects, the impetuous youth commits imprudent acts which lead to
his banishment from the city in 1546. For about a year he lives in
enforced retirement on the Upper Tagus (_Ribatejo_), pouring out his
profound passion and grief in a number of beautiful sonnets and
elegies. Most likely in consequence of some new offense, he is next
exiled for two years to Ceuta in Africa, where, in a fight with the
Moors, he loses his right eye by a chance splinter. Meeting on his
return to Lisbon in 1547 neither with pardon for his indiscretions nor
with recognition for his services and poetic talent, he allows his
keen resentment of this unjust treatment to impel him into the
reckless and turbulent life of a bully. It was thus that during the
festival of Corpus Christi in 1552 he got into a quarrel with Goncalo
Borges, one of the King's equerries, in which he wounded the latter.
For this Camoens was thrown into jail until March, 1553, when he was
released only on condition that he should embark to serve in India.
Not quite two weeks after leaving his prison, on March 24th, he sailed
for India on the flag-ship Sam Bento, bidding, as a true Renaissance
poet, farewell to his native land in the words of Scipio which were to
come true: "Ingrata patria non possidebis ossa mea." After a stormy
passage of six months, the Sam Bento cast anchor in the bay of Goa.
Camoens first took part in an expedition against the King of Pimenta,
and in the following year (1554) he joined another directed against
the Moorish pirates on the coast of Africa. The scenes of drunkenness
and dissoluteness which he witnessed in Goa inspired him with a number
of satirical poems, by which he drew upon himself much enmity and
persecution. In 1556 his three-years' term of service expired; but
though ardently longing for his beloved native land, he remained in
Goa, influenced either by his bent for the soldier's life or by the
sad news of the death of Donna Catharina de Athaide in that year. He
was ordered to Macao in China, to the lucrative post of commissary for
the effects of deceased or absent Portuguese subjects. There, in the
quietude of a grotto near Macao, still called the Grotto of Camoens,
the exiled poet finished the first six cantos of his great epic 'The
Lusiads.' Recalled from this post in 1558, before the expiration of
his term, on the charge of malversation of office, Camoens on his
return voyage to Goa was shipwrecked near the mouth of the Me-Kong,
saving nothing but his faithful Javanese slave and the manuscript of
his 'Lusiads'--which, swimming with one hand, he held above the water
with the other. In Cambodia, where he remained several months, he
wrote his marvelous paraphrase of the 137th psalm, contrasting under
the allegory of Babel (Babylon) and Siam (Zion), Goa and Lisbon. Upon
his return to Goa he was cast into prison, but soon set free on
proving his innocence by a public trial. Though receiving, in 1557,
another lucrative employment, Camoens finally resolved to go home,
burning with the desire to lay his patriotic song, now almost
completed, before his nation, and to cover with honor his injured
name.

He accepted a passage to Sofala offered him by Pedro Barreto, who had
become viceroy of Mozambique in that year. Unable to refund the amount
of the passage, he was once more held for debt and spent two years of
misery and distress in Mozambique, completing and polishing during
this time his great epic song and preparing the collection of his
lyrics, his 'Parnasso.' In 1559 he was released by the historian Diogo
do Couto and other friends of his, visiting Sofala with the expedition
of Noronha, and embarked on the Santa Clara for Lisbon.

On the 7th of April, 1570, Camoens once more set foot on his native
soil, only to find the city for which he had yearned, sadly changed.
The government was in the hands of a brave but harebrained and fanatic
young monarch, ruled by the Jesuits; the capital had been ravaged by a
terrible plague which had carried off fifty thousand souls; and its
society had no room for a man who brought with him from the Indies,
whence so many returned with great riches, nothing but a manuscript,
though in it was sung in classic verse the glory of his people. Still,
through the kind offices of his warm friend Dom Manoel de Portugal,
Camoens obtained, on the 25th of September, 1571, the royal permission
to print his epic. It was published in the spring of the following
year (March, 1572). Great as was the success of the work, which marked
a new epoch in Portuguese history, the reward which the poet received
for it was meagre. King Sebastian granted him an annual pension of
fifteen thousand reis (fifteen dollars, which then had the purchasing
value of about sixty dollars in our money), which, after the poet's
death, was ordered by Philip II. to be paid to his aged mother.
Destitute and broken in spirit, Camoens lived for the last eight years
of his life with his mother in a humble house near the convent of
Santa Ana, "in the knowledge of many and in the society of few." Dom
Sebastian's departure early in 1578 for the conquest in Africa once
more kindled patriotic hopes in his breast; but the terrible defeat at
Alcazarquivir (August 4th of the same year), in which Portugal lost
her king and her army, broke his heart. He died on the 10th of June,
1580, at which time the army of Philip II., under the command of the
Duke of Alva, was marching upon Lisbon. He was thus spared the cruel
blow of seeing, though not of foreseeing, the national death of his
country. The story that his Javanese slave Antonio used to go out at
night to beg of passers-by alms for his master, is one of a number of
touching legends which, as early as 1572, popular fancy had begun to
weave around the poet's life. It is true, however, that Camoens
breathed his last in dire distress and isolation, and was buried
"poorly and plebeianly" in the neighboring convent of Santa Ana. It
was not until sixteen years later that a friend of his, Dom Goncalo
Coutinho, caused his grave to be marked with a marble slab bearing the
inscription:--"Here lies Luis de Camoens, Prince of the Poets of his
time. He died in the year 1579. This tomb was placed for him by order
of D. Goncalo Coutinho, and none shall be buried in it." The words "He
lived poor and neglected, and so died," which in the popular tradition
form part of this inscription, are apocryphal, though entirely in
conformity with the facts. The correctness of 1580 instead of 1579 as
the year of the poet's death is proven by an official document in the
archives of Philip II. Both the memorial slab and the convent-church
of Santa Ana were destroyed by the earthquake of 1755 and during the
rebuilding of the convent, and the identification of the remains of
the great man thus rendered well-nigh impossible. In 1854, however,
all the bones found under the floor of the convent-church were placed
in a coffin of Brazil-wood and solemnly deposited in the convent at
Belem, the Pantheon of King Emanuel. In 1867 a statue was erected to
Camoens by the city of Lisbon.

'The Lusiads' (Portuguese, _Os Lusiadas_), a patronymic adopted by
Camoens in place of the usual term _Lusitanos_, the descendants of
Lusus (the mythical ancestor of the Portuguese), is an epic poem
which, as its name implies, has for its subject the heroic deeds not
of one hero, but of the whole Portuguese nation. Vasco da Gama's
discovery of the way to the East Indies forms, to be sure, the central
part of its action; but around it are grouped, with consummate art,
the heroic deeds and destinies of the other Lusitanians. In this,
Camoens' work stands alone among all poems of its kind. Originating
under conditions similar to those which are indispensable to the
production of a true epic, in the heroic period of the Portuguese
people, when national sentiment had risen to its highest point, it is
the only one among the modern epopees which comes near to the
primitive character of epic poetry. A trait which distinguishes this
epic from all its predecessors is the historic truthfulness with which
Camoens confessedly--"_A verdade_ que eu conto nua e pura Vence toda a
grandiloqua escriptura"--represents his heroic personages and their
exploits, tempering his praise with blame where blame is due, and the
unquestioned fidelity and exactness with which he depicts natural
scenes. Lest, however, this adherence to historic truth should impair
the vivifying element of imagination indispensable to true poetry, our
bard, combining in the true spirit of the Renaissance myth and
miracle, threw around his narrative the allegorical drapery of pagan
mythology, introducing the gods and goddesses of Olympus as siding
with or against the Portuguese heroes, and thus calling the
imagination of the reader into more active play. Among the many
beautiful inventions of his own creative fancy with which Camoens has
adorned his poem, we shall only mention the powerful impersonation of
the Cape of Storms in the Giant Adamastor (c. v.), an episode used by
Meyerbeer in his opera 'L'Africaine,' and the enchanting scene of the
Isle of Love (c. ix.), as characteristic of the poet's delicacy of
touch as it is of his Portuguese temperament, in which Venus provides
for the merited reward and the continuance of the brave sons of Lusus.
For the metric form of his verse, Camoens adopted the octave rhyme of
Ariosto, while for his epic style he followed Virgil, from whom many a
simile and phrase is directly borrowed. His poem, justly admired for
the elegant simplicity, the purity and harmony of its diction, bears
throughout the deep imprint of his own powerful and noble personality,
that independence and magnanimity of spirit, that fortitude of soul,
that genuine and glowing patriotism which alone, amid all the
disappointments and dangers, the dire distress and the foibles and
faults of his life, could enable him to give his mind and heart
steadfastly to the fulfillment of the lofty patriotic task he had set
his genius,--the creation of a lasting monument to the heroic deeds of
his race. It is thus that through 'The Lusiads' Camoens became the
moral bond of the national individuality of his people, and inspired
it with the energy to rise free once more out of Spanish subjection.

Lyrics. Here, Camoens is hardly less great than as an epic poet,
whether we consider the nobility, depth, and fervor of the sentiments
filling his songs, or the artistic perfection, the rich variety of
form, and the melody of his verse. His lyric works fall into two main
classes, those written in Italian metres and those in the traditional
trochaic lines and strophic forms of the Spanish peninsula. The first
class is contained in the 'Parnasso,' which comprises 356 sonnets, 22
canzones, 27 elegies, 12 odes, 8 octaves, and 15 idyls, all of which
testify to the great influence of the Italian school, and especially
of Petrarch, on our poet. The second class is embodied in the
'Cancioneiro,' or song-book, and embraces more than one hundred and
fifty compositions in the national peninsular manner. Together, these
two collections form a body of lyric verse of such richness and
variety as neither Petrarch and Tasso nor Garcilaso de la Vega can
offer. Unfortunately, Camoens never prepared an edition of his
_Rimas_; and the manuscript, which, as Diogo do Couto tells us, he
arranged during his sojourn in Mozambique from 1567 to 1569, is said
to have been stolen. It was not until 1595, fully fifteen years after
the poet's death, that one of his disciples and admirers, Fernao
Rodrigues Lobo Soropita, collected from Portugal, and even from India,
and published in Lisbon, a volume of one hundred and seventy-two
songs, four of which, however, are not by Camoens. The great mass of
verse we now possess has been gathered during the last three
centuries. More may still be discovered, while, on the other hand,
much of what is now attributed to Camoens does not belong to him, and
the question how much of the extant material is genuine is yet to be
definitely answered.

In his lyrics, Camoens has depicted, with all the passion and power of
his impressionable temperament, the varied experiences and emotions of
his eventful life. This variety and change of sentiments and
situations, while greatly enhancing the value of his songs by the
impression of fuller truth and individuality which they produce, is in
so far disadvantageous to a just appreciation of them, as it naturally
brings with it much verse of inferior poetic merit, and lacks that
harmony and unity of emotion which Petrarch was able to effect in his
_Rime_ by confining himself to the portraiture of a lover's soul.

Drama. In his youth, most likely during his life at court between 1542
and 1546, Camoens wrote three comedies of much freshness and verve, in
which he surpassed all the Portuguese plays in the national taste
produced up to his time. One, 'Filodemo,' derives its plot from a
mediaeval novel; the other two, 'Rei Seleuco' (King Seleucus) and
'Amphitryoes,' from antiquity. The last named, a free imitation of
Plautus's 'Amphitryo,' is by far the best play of the three. In these
comedies we can recognize an attempt on the part of the author to fuse
the imperfect play in the national taste, such as it had been
cultivated by Gil Vicente, with the more regular but lifeless pieces
of the classicists, and thus to create a superior form of national
comedy. In this endeavor, however, Camoens found no followers.

Bibliography. The most complete edition of the works of Camoens is
that by the Viscount de Juromenha, 'Obras de Luiz de Camoes,' (6
vols., Lisbon, 1860-70); a more convenient edition is the one by Th.
Braga (in 'Bibliotheca da Actualidade,' 3 vols., Porto, 1874). The
best separate edition of the text of 'The Lusiads' is by F.A. Coelho
(Lisbon, 1880). Camoens' lyric and dramatic works are published in his
collected works, no separate editions of them existing thus far. In
regard to the life and works of Camoens in general cf. Adamson,
'Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Camoens' (2 vols., London, 1820);
Th. Braga, 'Historia de Camoens' (3 vols., Porto, 1873-75); Latino
Coelho, 'Luiz de Camoens' (in the 'Galeria de varoes illustres,' i.,
Lisbon, 1880); J. de Vasconcellos, 'Bibliographia Camoniana' (Porto,
1880); Brito Aranha, 'Estudos Bibliographicos' (Lisbon, 1887-8); W.
Storck, 'Luis' de Camoens Leben' (Paderborn, 1890); and especially
the judicious and impartial article by Mrs. Carolina Michaelis de
Vasconcellos in Vol. ii. of Groeber's 'Grundriss der romanischen
Philologie' (Strassburg, 1894). The best translations of Camoens'
works are the one by W. Storck, 'Camoens' (Saemmtliche Gedichte, 6
vols., Paderborn, 1880-85), into German, and the one by R.F. Burton,
who has also written on the life of the poet, 'The Lusiads' (2 vols.,
London, 1880), and 'The Lyricks' (3 vols., London, 1884, containing
only those in Italian metres), into English. The extracts given below
are from Burton.

[Signature: Henry R. Lang]

THE LUSIADS

CANTO I

The feats of Arms, and famed heroick Host,
from occidental Lusitanian strand,
who o'er the waters ne'er by seaman crost,
fared beyond the Taprobane-land,
forceful in perils and in battle-post,
with more than promised force of mortal hand;
and in the regions of a distant race
rear'd a new throne so haught in Pride of Place:

And, eke, the Kings of mem'ory grand and glorious,
who hied them Holy Faith and Reign to spread,
converting, conquering, and in lands notorious,
Africk and Asia, devastation made;
nor less the Lieges who by deeds memorious
brake from the doom that binds the vulgar dead;
my song would sound o'er Earth's extremest part
were mine the genius, mine the Poet's art.

Cease the sage Grecian, and the man of Troy
to vaunt long voyage made in by-gone day:
Cease Alexander, Trojan cease to 'joy
the fame of vict'ories that have pass'd away:
The noble Lusian's stouter breast sing I,
whom Mars and Neptune dared not disobey:
Cease all that antique Muse hath sung, for now
a better Brav'ry rears its bolder brow.

And you, my Tagian Nymphs, who have create
in me new purpose with new genius firing;
if 'twas my joy whilere to celebrate
your founts and stream my humble song inspiring;
Oh! lend me here a noble strain elate,
a style grandiloquent that flows untiring;
so shall Apollo for your waves ordain ye
in name and fame ne'er envy Hippokrene.

Grant me sonorous accents, fire-abounding,
now serves ne peasant's pipe, ne rustick reed;
but blasts of trumpet, long and loud resounding,
that 'flameth heart and hue to fiery deed:
Grant me high strains to suit their Gestes astounding,
your Sons, who aided Mars in martial need;
that o'er the world he sung the glorious song,
if theme so lofty may to verse belong.

And Thou! O goodly omen'd trust, all-dear[1]
to Lusitania's olden liberty,
whereon assured esperance we rear
enforced to see our frail Christianity:
Thou, O new terror to the Moorish spear,
the fated marvel of our century,
to govern worlds of men by God so given,
that the world's best be given to God and Heaven:

Thou young, thou tender, ever-flourishing bough,
true scion of tree by Christ beloved more
than aught that Occident did ever know,
"Caesarian" or "Most Christian" styled before:
Look on thy 'scutcheon, and behold it show
the present Vict'ory long past ages bore;
Arms which He gave and made thine own to be
by Him assured on the fatal tree:[2]

Thou, mighty Sovran! o'er whose lofty reign
the rising Sun rains earliest smile of light;
sees it from middle firmamental plain;
And sights it sinking on the breast of Night:
Thou, whom we hope to hail the blight, the bane
of the dishonour'd Ishmaelitish knight;
and Orient Turk, and Gentoo--misbeliever
that drinks the liquor of the Sacred River:[3]

Incline awhile, I pray, that majesty
which in thy tender years I see thus ample,
E'en now prefiguring full maturity
that shall be shrined in Fame's eternal temple:
Those royal eyne that beam benignity
bend on low earth: Behold a new ensample
of hero hearts with patriot pride inflamed,
in number'd verses manifold proclaimed.

Thou shalt see Love of Land that ne'er shall own
lust of vile lucre; soaring towards th' Eternal:
For 'tis no light ambition to be known
th' acclaimed herald of my nest paternal.
Hear; thou shalt see the great names greater grown
of Vavasors who hail the Lord Supernal:
So shalt thou judge which were the higher station,
King of the world or Lord of such a nation.

Hark, for with vauntings vain thou shalt not view
phantastical, fictitious, lying deed
of lieges lauded, as strange Muses do,
seeking their fond and foolish pride to feed
Thine acts so forceful are, told simply true,
all fabled, dreamy feats they far exceed;
exceeding Rodomont, and Ruggiero vain,
and Roland haply born of Poet's brain.

For these I give thee a Nuno, fierce in fight,
who for his King and Country freely bled;
an Egas and a Fuas; fain I might
for them my lay with harp Homeric wed!
For the twelve peerless Peers again I cite
the Twelve of England by Magrico led:
Nay, more, I give thee Gama's noble name,
who for himself claims all AEneas' fame.

And if in change for royal Charles of France,
or rivalling Caesar's mem'ories thou wouldst trow,
the first Afonso see, whose conquering lance
lays highest boast of stranger glories low:
See him who left his realm th' inheritance
fair Safety, born of wars that crusht the foe:
That other John, a knight no fear deter'd,
the fourth and fifth Afonso, and the third.

Nor shall they silent in my song remain,
they who in regions there where Dawns arise,
by Acts of Arms such glories toil'd to gain,
where thine unvanquisht flag for ever flies,
Pacheco, brave of braves; th' Almeidas twain,
whom Tagus mourns with ever-weeping eyes;
dread Albuquerque, Castro stark and brave,
with more, the victors of the very grave.

But, singing these, of thee I may not sing,
O King sublime! such theme I fain must fear.
Take of thy reign the reins, so shall my King
create a poesy new to mortal ear:
E'en now the mighty burthen here I ring
(and speed its terrors over all the sphere!)
of sing'ular prowess, War's own prodigies,
in Africk regions and on Orient seas.

Casteth on thee the Moor eyne cold with fright,
in whom his coming doom he views designed:
The barb'rous Gentoo, sole to see thy sight
yields to thy yoke the neck e'en now inclined;
Tethys, of azure seas the sovran right,
her realm, in dowry hath to thee resigned;
and by thy noble tender beauty won,
would bribe and buy thee to become her son.

In thee from high Olympick halls behold
themselves, thy grandsires' sprites; far-famed pair;[4]
this clad in Peacetide's angel-robe of gold,
that crimson-hued with paint of battle-glare:
By thee they hope to see their tale twice told,
their lofty mem'ries live again; and there,
when Time thy years shall end, for thee they 'sign
a seat where soareth Fame's eternal shrine.

But, sithence ancient Time slow minutes by
ere ruled the Peoples who desire such boon;
bend on my novel rashness favouring eye,
that these my verses may become thine own:
So shalt thou see thine Argonauts o'erfly
yon salty argent, when they see it shown
thou seest their labours on the raging sea:
Learn even now invok'd of man to be.[5]

[1] Invocation to Dom Sebastian.

[2] The Arms of Portugal (Canto iii., 53, 54).

[3] The Ganges (not the Jordan).

[4] D. Joam III. and the Emperor Charles Quint.

[5] End of exordium: narrative begins.

CANTO III

Now, my Calliope! to teach incline
what speech great Gama for the king did frame:
Inspire immortal song, grant voice divine
unto this mortal who so loves thy name.
Thus may the God whose gift was Medicine,
to whom thou barest Orpheus, lovely Dame!
never for Daphne, Clytia, Leucothoe
due love deny thee or inconstant grow he.

Satisfy, Nymph! desires that in me teem,
to sing the merits of thy Lusians brave;
so worlds shall see and say that Tagus-stream
rolls Aganippe's liquor. Leave, I crave,
leave flow'ry Pindus-head; e'en now I deem
Apollo bathes me in that sovran wave;
else must I hold it, that thy gentle sprite,
fears thy dear Orpheus fade through me from sight.

All stood with open ears in long array
to hear what mighty Gama mote unfold;
when, past in thoughtful mood a brief delay,
began he thus with brow high-raised and bold:--
"Thou biddest me, O King! to say my say
anent our grand genealogy of old:
Thou bidd'st me not relate an alien story;
Thou bidd'st me laud my brother Lusian's glory.

"That one praise others' exploits and renown
is honour'd custom which we all desire;
yet fear I 'tis unfit to praise mine own;
lest praise, like this suspect, no trust inspire;
nor may I hope to make all matters known
for Time however long were short; yet, sire!
as thou commandest all is owed to thee;
maugre my will I speak and brief will be.

"Nay, more, what most obligeth me, in fine,
is that no leasing in my tale may dwell;
for of such Feats whatever boast be mine,
when most is told, remaineth much to tell:
But that due order wait on the design,
e'en as desirest thou to learn full well,
the wide-spread Continent first I'll briefly trace,
then the fierce bloody wars that waged my race.

* * * * *

"Lo! here her presence showeth noble Spain,
of Europe's body corporal the head;
o'er whose home-rule, and glorious foreign reign,
the fatal Wheel so many a whirl hath made;
Yet ne'er her Past or force or fraud shall stain,
nor restless Fortune shall her name degrade;
no bonds her bellic offspring bind so tight
but it shall burst them with its force of sprite.

"There, facing Tingitania's shore, she seemeth
to block and bar the Med'iterranean wave,
where the known Strait its name ennobled deemeth
by the last labour of the Theban Brave.
Big with the burthen of her tribes she teemeth,
circled by whelming waves that rage and rave;
all noble races of such valiant breast,
that each may justly boast itself the best.

"Hers the Tarragonese who, famed in war,
made aye-perturbed Parthenope obey;
the twain Asturias, and the haught Navarre
twin Christian bulwarks on the Moslem way:
Hers the Gallego canny, and the rare
Castilian, whom his star raised high to sway
Spain as her saviour, and his seign'iory feel
Baetis, Leon, Granada, and Castile.

"See, the head-crowning coronet is she
of general Europe, Lusitania's reign,
where endeth land and where beginneth sea,
and Phoebus sinks to rest upon the main.
Willed her the Heavens with all-just decree
by wars to mar th' ignoble Mauritan,
to cast him from herself: nor there consent
he rule in peace the Fiery Continent.

"This is my happy land, my home, my pride;
where, if the Heav'ens but grant the pray'er I pray
for glad return and every risk defied,
there may my life-light fail and fade away.
This was the Lusitania, name applied
by Lusus or by Lysa, sons, they say,
of antient Bacchus, or his boon compeers,
eke the first dwellers of her eldest years.

"Here sprang the Shepherd,[6] in whose name we see
forecast of virile might, of virtuous meed;
whose fame no force shall ever hold in fee,
since fame of mighty Rome ne'er did the deed.
This, by light Heaven's volatile decree,
that antient Scyther, who devours his seed,
made puissant pow'er in many a part to claim,
assuming regal rank; and thus it came:--

"A King there was in Spain, Afonso hight,
who waged such warfare with the Saracen,
that by his 'sanguined arms, and arts, and might,
he spoiled the lands and lives of many men.
When from Herculean Calpe winged her flight
his fame to Caucasus Mount and Caspian glen,
many a knight, who noblesse coveteth,
comes offering service to such King and Death.

"And with intrinsic love inflamed more
for the True Faith, than honours popular,
they trooped, gath'ering from each distant shore,
leaving their dear-loved homes and lands afar.
When with high feats of force against the Moor
they proved of sing'ular worth in Holy War,
willed Afonso that their mighty deeds
commens'urate gifts command and equal meeds.

"'Mid them Henrique, second son, men say,
of a Hungarian King, well-known and tried,
by sort won Portugal which, in his day,
ne prized was ne had fit cause for pride:
His strong affection stronger to display
the Spanish King decreed a princely bride,
his only child, Teresa, to the count;
And with her made him Seigneur Paramount.

"This doughty Vassal from that servile horde,
Hagar, the handmaid's seed, great vict'ories won;
reft the broad lands adjacent with his sword
and did whatever Brav'ery bade be done;
Him, for his exploits excellent to reward,
God gave in shortest space a gallant son,
whose arm to 'noble and enfame was fain
the warlike name of Lusitania's reign.

"Once more at home this conqu'ering Henry stood
who sacred Hierosol'yma had relieved,
his eyes had fed on Jordan's holy flood,
which the Dear Body of Lord God had laved;
when Godfrey left no foe to be subdued,
and all Judaea conquered was and saved,
many that in his wars had done devoir
to their own lordships took the way once more.

"But when this stout and gallant Hun attained
Life's fatal period, age and travail-spent,
he gave, by Death's necessity constrained,
his sprite to him that had that spirit lent:
A son of tender years alone remained,
to whom the Sire bequeath'd his 'bodiment;
with bravest braves the youth was formed to cope,
for from such sire such son the world may hope.

"Yet old Report, I know not what its weight
(for on such antique tale no man relies),
saith that the Mother, tane in tow the State,
A second nuptial bed did not despise:
Her orphan son to disinher'ited fate
she doomed, declaring hers the dignities,
not his, with seigniory o'er all the land,
her spousal dowry by her sire's command.

"Now Prince Afonso (who such style had tane
in pious mem'ory of his Grandsire's name),
seeing no part and portion in his reign
all pilled and plundered by the Spouse and Dame.
by dour and doughty Mars inflamed amain,
privily plots his heritage to claim:
He weighs the causes in his own conceit
till firm Resolve its fit effect shall greet.

"Of Guimara'ens the field already flow'd
with floods of civil warfare's bloody tide,
where she, who little of the Mother show'd,
to her own bowels love and land denied.
Fronting the child in fight the parent stood;
nor saw her depth of sin that soul of pride
against her God, against maternal love:
Her sensual passion rose all pow'r above.

"O magical Medea! O Progne dire!
if your own babes in vengeance dared ye kill
for alien crimes, and injuries of the sire,
look ye, Teresa's deed was darker still.
Foul greed of gain, incontinent desire,
were the main causes of such bitter ill:
Scylla her aged sire for one did slay,
for both Teresa did her son betray.

"Right soon that noble Prince clear vict'ory won
from his harsh Mother and her Fere indign;
in briefest time the land obeyed the son,
though first to fight him did the folk incline.
But reft of reason and by rage undone
he bound the Mother in the biting chain:
Eftsoons avenged her griefs the hand of God:
Such veneration is to parents ow'd.

"Lo! the superb Castilian 'gins prepare
his pow'r to 'venge Teresa's injuries,
against the Lusian land in men so rare,
whereon ne toil ne trouble heavy lies.
Their breasts the cruel battle grandly dare,
aid the good cause angelic Potencies;
unrecking might unequal still they strive,
nay, more, their dreadful foe to flight they drive!

"Passeth no tedious time, before the great
Prince a dure Siege in Guimaraens dree'd
by passing pow'er, for to 'mend his state,
came the fell en'emy, full of grief and greed:
But when committed life to direful Fate,
Egas, the faithful guardian, he was free'd,
who had in any other way been lost,
all unprepared 'gainst such 'whelming host.

"But when the loyal Vassal well hath known
how weak his Monarch's arm to front such fight,
sans order wending to the Spanish fone,
his Sovran's homage he doth pledge and plight.
Straight from the horrid siege th' invader flown
trusteth the word and honour of the Knight,
Egas Moniz: But now the noble breast
of the brave Youth disdaineth strange behest.

"Already came the plighted time and tide,
when the Castilian Don stood dight to see,
before his pow'er the Prince bend low his pride,
yielding the promised obediency.
Egas who views his knightly word belied,
while still Castile believes him true to be,
Sweet life resolveth to the winds to throw,
nor live with foulest taint of faithless vow.

"He with his children and his wife departeth
to keep his promise with a faith immense;
unshod and stripped, while their plight imparteth
far more of pity than of vengeance:
'If, mighty Monarch! still thy spirit smarteth
to wreak revenge on my rash confidence,'
quoth he, 'Behold! I come with life to save
my pledge, my knightly honour's word I gave.'

"'I bring, thou seest here, lives innocent,
of wife, of sinless children dight to die;
if breasts of gen'erous mould and excellent
accept such weaklings' woeful destiny.
Thou seest these hands, this tongue inconsequent:
hereon alone the fierce exper'iment try
of torments, death, and doom that pass in full
Sinis or e'en Perillus' brazen bull.'

"As shrifted wight the hangman stands before,
in life still draining bitter draught of death,
lays throat on block, and of all hope forlore,
expects the blighting blow with bated breath:
So, in the Prince's presence angry sore,
Egas stood firm to keep his plighted faith:
When the King, marv'elling at such wondrous truth,
feels anger melt and merge in Royal ruth.

"Oh the great Portingall fidelity
of Vassal self-devote to doom so dread!
What did the Persian more for loyalty
whose gallant hand his face and nostrils shred?
When great Darius mourned so grievously
that he a thousand times deep-sighing said,
far he prefer'd his Zop'yrus sound again,
than lord of twenty Babylons to reign.

"But Prince Afonso now prepared his band
of happy Lusians proud to front the foes,
those haughty Moors that held the glorious land
yon side where clear delicious Tagus flows:
Now on Ourique[8] field was pitched and plan'd
the Royal 'Campment fierce and bellicose,
facing the hostile host of Sarrasin
though there so many, here so few there bin.

"Confident, yet would he in naught confide,
save in his God that holds of Heav'en the throne;
so few baptized stood their King beside,
there were an hundred Moors for every one:
Judge any sober judgment, and decide
'twas deed of rashness or by brav'ery done
to fall on forces whose exceeding might
a cent'ury showed to a single Knight.

"Order five Moorish Kings the hostile host
of whom Ismar, so called, command doth claim;
all of long Warfare large experience boast,
wherein may mortals win immortal fame:
And gallant dames the Knights they love the most
'company, like that brave and beauteous Dame,
who to beleaguered Troy such aidance gave
with woman-troops that drained Thermodon's wave.

"The coolth serene, and early morning's pride,
now paled the sparkling stars about the Pole,
when Mary's Son appearing crucified
in vision, strengthened King Afonso's soul.
But he, adoring such appearance, cried,
fired with a phrenzied faith beyond control:
'To th' Infidel, O Lord! to th' Infidel:[9]
Not, Lord, to me who know Thy pow'er so well.'

"Such gracious marvel in such manner sent
'flamed the Lusians' spirits fierce and high,
towards their nat'ural King, that excellent
Prince, unto whom love-boon none could deny:
Aligned to front the foeman prepotent,
they shouted res'onant slogan to the sky,
and fierce the 'larum rose, 'Real, real,
for high Afonso, King of Portugal!'

* * * * *

"Accomplished his act of arms victorious,
home to his Lusian realm Afonso[10] sped,
to gain from Peace-tide triumphs great and glorious,
as those he gained in wars and battles dread;
when the sad chance, on History's page memorious,
which can unsepulchre the sheeted dead,
befell that ill-starr'd, miserable Dame
who, foully slain, a throned Queen became.

"Thou, only thou, pure Love, whose cruel might
obligeth human hearts to weal and woe,
thou, only thou, didst wreak such foul despight,
as though she were some foul perfidious foe.
Thy burning thirst, fierce Love, they say aright,
may not be quencht by saddest tears that flow;
Nay, more, thy sprite of harsh tyrannick mood
would see thine altars bathed with human blood.

"He placed thee, fair Ignez! in soft retreat,
culling the first-fruits of thy sweet young years,
in that delicious Dream, that dear Deceit,
whose long endurance Fortune hates and fears:
Hard by Mondego's yearned-for meads thy seat,
where linger, flowing still, those lovely tears,
until each hill-born tree and shrub confest
the name of Him deep writ within thy breast.[11]

"There, in thy Prince awoke responsive-wise,
dear thoughts of thee which soul-deep ever lay;
which brought thy beauteous form before his eyes,
whene'er those eyne of thine were far away;
Night fled in falsest, sweetest phantasies,
in fleeting, flying reveries sped the Day;
and all, in fine, he saw or cared to see
were memories of his love, his joys, his thee.

"Of many a dainty dame and damosel
The coveted nuptial couches he rejecteth;
for naught can e'er, pure Love! thy care dispel,
when one enchanting shape thy heart subjecteth.
These whims of passion to despair compel
the Sire, whose old man's wisdom aye respecteth,
his subjects murmuring at his son's delay
to bless the nation with a bridal day.

"To wrench Ignez from life he doth design,
better his captured son from her to wrench;
deeming that only blood of death indign
the living lowe of such true Love can quench.
What Fury willed it that the steel so fine,
which from the mighty weight would never flinch
of the dread Moorman, should be drawn in hate
to work that hapless delicate Ladye's fate?

"The horr'ible Hangmen hurried her before
the King, now moved to spare her innocence;
but still her cruel murther urged the more
the People, swayed by fierce and false pretence.
She with her pleadings pitiful and sore,
that told her sorrows and her care immense
for her Prince-spouse and babes, whom more to leave
than her own death the mother's heart did grieve:

"And heav'enwards to the clear and crystalline skies,
raising her eyne with piteous tears bestained;
her eyne, because her hands with cruel ties
one of the wicked Ministers constrained:
And gazing on her babes in wistful guise,
whose pretty forms she loved with love unfeigned,
whose orphan'd lot the Mother filled with dread,
until their cruel grandsire thus she said:--

"'If the brute-creatures, which from natal day
on cruel ways by Nature's will were bent;
or feral birds whose only thought is prey,
upon aerial rapine all intent;
if men such salvage be'ings have seen display
to little children loving sentiment,
e'en as to Ninus' mother did befall,
and to the twain who rear'd the Roman wall:

"'O thou, who bear'st of man the gest and breast,
(an it be manlike thus to draw the sword
on a weak girl because her love imprest
his heart, who took her heart and love in ward);
respect for these her babes preserve, at least!
since it may not her obscure death retard:
Moved be thy pitying soul for them and me,
although my faultless fault unmoved thou see!

"'And if thou know'est to deal in direful fight
the doom of brand and blade to Moorish host,
Know also thou to deal of life the light
to one who ne'er deserved her life be lost;
But an thou wouldst mine inno'cence thus requite,
place me for aye on sad exiled coast,
in Scythian sleet, on seething Libyan shore,
with life-long tears to linger evermore.

"'Place me where beasts with fiercest rage abound,--
Lyons and Tygers,--there, ah! let me find
if in their hearts of flint be pity found,
denied to me by heart of humankind.
There with intrinsic love and will so fond
for him whose love is death, there will I tend
these tender pledges whom thou see'st; and so
shall the sad mother cool her burning woe.'

"Inclin'ed to pardon her the King benign,
moved by this sad lament to melting mood;
but the rude People and Fate's dure design
(that willed it thus) refused the pardon sued:
They draw their swords of steely temper fine,
They who proclaim as just such deed of blood:
Against a ladye, caitiff, felon wights!
how showed ye here, brute beasts or noble Knights?

"Thus on Polyxena, that beauteous maid,
last solace of her mother's age and care,
when doom'd to die by fierce Achilles' shade,
the cruel Pyrrhus hasted brand to bare:
But she (a patient lamb by death waylaid)
with the calm glances which serene the air,
casts on her mother, mad with grief, her eyes
and silent waits that awesome sacrifice.

"Thus dealt with fair Ignez the murth'erous crew,
in th' alabastrine neck that did sustain
the charms whereby could Love the love subdue
of him, who crown'd her after death his Queen;
bathing their blades; the flow'ers of snowy hue,
which often water'ed by her eyne had been,
are blood-dyed; and they burn with blinding hate,
reckless of tortures stor'd for them by Fate.

"Well mightest shorn of rays, O Sun! appear
to fiends like these on day so dark and dire;
as when Thyestes ate the meats that were
his seed, whom Atreus slew to spite their sire.
And you, O hollow Valleys! doomed to hear
her latest cry from stiffening lips expire--
her Pedro's name,--did catch that mournful sound,
whose echoes bore it far and far around!

"E'en as Daisy sheen, that hath been shorn
in time untimely, floret fresh and fair,
and by untender hand of maiden torn
to deck the chaplet for her wreathed hair;
gone is its odor and its colours mourn;
So pale and faded lay that Ladye there;
dried are the roses of her cheek, and fled
the white live color, with her dear life dead.

"Mondego's daughter-Nymphs the death obscure
wept many a year, with wails of woe exceeding;
and for long mem'ry changed to fountain pure
the floods of grief their eyes were ever feeding:
The name they gave it, which doth still endure,
revived Ignez, whose murthered love lies bleeding,
see yon fresh fountain flowing 'mid the flowers,
tears are its waters, and its name 'Amores!'[12]

"Time ran not long, ere Pedro saw the day
of vengeance dawn for wounds that ever bled;
who, when he took in hand the kingly sway,
eke took the murth'erers who his rage had fled:
Them a most cruel Pedro did betray;
for both, if human life the foemen dread,
made concert savage and dure pact, unjust as
Lepidus made with Anthony' and Augustus."

[6] Viriatus.

[7] Valdevez, or Campo da Matanca, A.D. 1128 (Canto iv. 16).

[8] Battle of Ourique, A.D. 1139.

[9] _I. e._, disclose Thyself; show a sign.

[10] Alfonso IV. (1325-1357).

[11] Writing his name upon the tree-trunks and leaves.

[12] The famous _Fonte-dos-Amores_, near Coimbra.

THE CANZON OF LIFE

Come here! my confidential Secretary
Of the complaints in which my days are rife,
Paper,--whereon I gar my griefs o'erflow.
Tell we, we twain, Unreasons which in life
Deal me inexorable, contrary
Destinies surd to prayer and tearful woe.
Dash we some water-drops on muchel lowe,
Fire we with outcries storm of rage so rare
That shall be strange to mortal memory.
Such misery tell we
To God and Man, and eke, in fine, to air,
Whereto so many times did I confide
My tale and vainly told as I now tell;
But e'en as error was my birthtide-lot,
That this be one of many doubt I not.
And as to hit the butt so far I fail
E'en if I sinned her cease they to chide:
Within mine only Refuge will I 'bide
To speak and faultless sin with free intent.
Sad he so scanty mercies must content!

Long I've unlearnt me that complaint of dole
Brings cure of dolours; but a wight in pain
To greet is forced an the grief be great.
I _will_ outgreet; but weak my voice and vain
To express the sorrows which oppress my soul;
For nor with greeting shall my dole abate.
Who then shall grant me, to relieve my weight
Of sorrow, flowing tears and infinite sighs
Equal those miseries my Sprite o'erpower?
But who at any hour,
Can measure miseries with his tears or cries?
I'll tell, in fine, the love for me design'd
By wrath and woe and all their sovenance;
For other dole hath qualities harder, sterner.
Draw near and hear me each despairing Learner!
And fly the many fed on Esperance
Or wights who fancy Hope will prove her kind;
For Love and Fortune willed, with single mind,
To leave them hopeful, so they comprehend
What measure of unweal in hand they hend.

III

When fro' man's primal grave, the mother's womb,
New eyes on earth I oped, my hapless star
To mar my Fortunes 'gan his will enforce;
And freedom (Free-will given me) to debar:
I learnt a thousand times it was my doom.
To know the Better and to work the Worse:
Then with conforming tormentize to curse
My course of coming years, when cast I round
A boyish eye-glance with a gentle zest,
It was my Star's behest
A Boy born blind should deal me life-long wound.
Infantine tear-drops welled out the deep
With vague enamoured longings, nameless pine:
My wailing accents fro' my cradle-stound
Already sounded me love-sighing sound.
Thus age and destiny had like design:
For when, peraunter, rocking me to sleep
They sung me Love-songs wherein lovers weep,
Attonce by Nature's will asleep I fell,
So Melancholy witcht me with her spell!

My nurse some Feral was; Fate nilled approve
By any Woman such a name be tane
Who gave me breast; nor seemed it suitable.
Thus was I suckled that my lips indrain
E'en fro' my childhood venom-draught of Love,
Whereof in later years I drained my fill,
Till by long custom failed the draught to kill.
Then an Ideal semblance struck my glance
Of that fere Human deckt with charms in foyson,
Sweet with the suavest poyson,
Who nourisht me with paps of Esperance;
Till later saw mine eyes the original,
Which of my wildest, maddest appetite
Makes sinful error sovran and superb.
Meseems as human form it came disturb,
But scintillating Spirit's divinest light.
So graceful gait, such port imperial
Were hers, unweal vainglory'd self to weal
When in her sight, whose lively sheen and shade
Exceeded aught and all things Nature made.

What new unkindly kind of human pain
Had Love not only doled for me to dree
But eke on me was wholly execute?
Implacable harshness cooling fervency
Of Love-Desire (thought's very might and main)
Drave me far distant fro' my settled suit,
Vext and self-shamed to sight its own pursuit.
Hence sombre shades phantastick born and bred
Of trifles promising rashest Esperance;
While boons of happy chance
Were likewise feigned and enfigured.
But her despisal wrought me such dismay
That made my Fancy phrenesy-ward incline,
Turning to disconcert the guiling lure.
Here mine 'twas to divine, and hold for sure,
That all was truest Truth I could divine;
And straightway all I said in shame to unsay;
To see whatso I saw in contrayr way;
In fine, just Reasons seek for jealousy
Yet were the Unreasons eather far to see.

I know not how she knew that fared she stealing
With Eyen-rays mine inner man which flew
Her-ward with subtlest passage through the eyne
Little by little all fro' me she drew,
E'en as from rain-wet canopy, exhaling
The subtle humours, sucks the hot sunshine.
The pure transparent geste and mien, in fine,
Wherefore inadequate were and lacking sense
"Beauteous" and "Belle" were words withouten weight;
The soft, compassionate
Eye-glance that held the spirit in suspense:
Such were the magick herbs the Heavens all-wise
Drave me a draught to drain, and for long years
To other Being my shape and form transmew'd;
And this transforming with such joy I view'd
That e'en my sorrows snared I with its snares;
And, like the doomed man, I veiled mine eyes
To hide an evil crescive in such guise;
Like one caressed and on flattery fed
Of Love, for whom his being was born and bred.

VII

Then who mine absent Life hath power to paint
Wi' discontent of all I bore in view;
That Bide, so far from where she had her Bide,
Speaking, which even what I spake unknew,
Wending, withal unseeing where I went,
And sighing weetless for what cause I sigh'd?
Then, as those torments last endurance tried,
That dreadful dolour which from Tartarus's waves
Shot up on earth and racketh more than all,
Wherefrom shall oft befall
It turn to gentle yearning rage that raves?
Then with repine-ful fury fever-high
Wishing yet wishing not for Love's surcease;
Shifting to other side for vengeaence,
Desires deprived of their esperance,
What now could ever change such ills as these?
Then the fond yearnings for the things gone by,
Pure torment sweet in bitter faculty,
Which from these fiery furies could distill
Sweet tears of Love with pine the soul to thrill?

VIII

For what excuses lone with self I sought,
When my suave Love forfended me to find
Fault in the Thing beloved and so loved?
Such were the feigned cures that forged my mind
In fear of torments that for ever taught
Life to support itself by snares approved.
Thus through a goodly part of Life I roved,
Wherein if ever joyed I aught content
Short-lived, immodest, flaw-full, without heed,
'Twas nothing save the seed
That bare me bitter tortures long unspent.
This course continuous dooming to distress,
These wandering steps that strayed o'er every road
So wrought, they quencht for me the flamy thirst
I suffered grow in Sprite, in Soul I nurst
With Thoughts enamoured for my daily food,
Whereby was fed my Nature's tenderness:
And this by habit's long and asperous stress,
Which might of mortals never mote resist,
Was turned to pleasure-taste of being triste.

Thus fared I Life with other interchanging;
I no, but Destiny showing fere unlove;
Yet even thus for other ne'er I'd change.
Me from my dear-loved patrial nide she drove
Over the broad and boisterous Ocean ranging,
Where Life so often saw her extreme range.
Now tempting rages rare and missiles strange
Of Mart, she willed that my eyes should see
And hands should touch, the bitter fruit he dight:
That on this Shield they sight
In painted semblance fire of enemy,
Then ferforth driven, vagrant, peregrine,
Seeing strange nations, customs, tongues, costumes;
Various heavens, qualities different,
Only to follow, passing-diligent
Thee, giglet Fortune! whose fierce will consumes
Man's age upbuilding aye before his eyne
A Hope with semblance of the diamond's shine:
But, when it falleth out of hand we know,
'Twas fragile glass that showed so glorious show.

Failed me the ruth of man, and I descried
Friends to unfriendly changed and contrayr,
In my first peril; and I lacked ground,
Whelmed by the second, where my feet could fare;
Air for my breathing was my lot denied,
Time failed me, in fine, and failed me Life's dull round.
What darkling secret, mystery profound
This birth to Life, while Life is doomed withhold
Whate'er the world contain for Life to use!
Yet never Life to lose
Though 'twas already lost times manifold!
In brief my Fortune could no horror make,
Ne certain danger ne ancipitous case
(Injustice dealt by men, whom wild-confused
Misrule, that rights of olden days abused,
O'er neighbour-men upraised to power and place!)
I bore not, lashed to the sturdy stake,
Of my long suffering, which my heart would break
With importuning persecuting harms
Dasht to a thousand bits by forceful arms.

Number I not so numerous ills as He
Who, 'scaped the wuthering wind and furious flood,
In happy harbour tells his travel-tale;
Yet now, e'en now, my Fortune's wavering mood
To so much misery obligeth me
That e'en to pace one forward pace I quail:
No more shirk I what evils may assail;
No more to falsing welfare I pretend;
For human cunning naught can gar me gain.
In fine on sovran Strain
Of Providence divine I now depend:
This thought, this prospect 'tis at times I greet
My sole consoler for dead hopes and fears.
But human weakness when its eyne alight
Upon the things that fleet, and can but sight
The sadding Memories of the long-past years;
What bread such times I break, what drink I drain,
Are bitter tear-floods I can ne'er refrain,
Save by upbuilding castles based on air,
Phantastick painture fair and false as fair.

XII

For an it possible were that Time and Tide
Could bend them backward and, like Memory, view
The faded footprints of Life's earlier day;
And, web of olden story weaving new,
In sweetest error could my footsteps guide
'Mid bloom of flowers where wont my youth to stray;
Then would the memories of the long sad way
Deal me a larger store of Life-content:
Viewing fair converse and glad company,
Where this and other key
She had for opening hearts to new intent;--
The fields, the frequent stroll, the lovely show,
The view, the snow, the rose, the formosure,
The soft and gracious mien so gravely gay,
The singular friendship casting clean away
All villein longings, earthly and impure,
As one whose Other I can never see;--
Ah, vain, vain memories! whither lead ye me
With this weak heart that still must toil and tire
To tame (as tame it should) your vain Desire?

L'ENVOI

No more, Canzon! no more: for I could prate
Sans compt a thousand years; and if befall
Blame to thine over-large and long-drawn strain
We ne'er shall see (assure who blames) contain
An Ocean's water packt in vase so small,
Nor sing I delicate lines in softest tone
For gust of praise; my song to man makes known
Pure Truth wherewith mine own Experience teems;
Would God they were the stuff that builds our dreams!

ADIEU TO COIMBRA

Sweet lucent waters of Mondego-stream,
Of my Remembrance restful jouissance,
Where far-fet, lingering, traitorous Esperance
Long whiles misled me in a blinding Dream:
Fro' you I part, yea, still I'll ne'er misdeem
That long-drawn Memories which your charms enhance
Forbid me changing and, in every chance,
E'en as I farther speed I nearer seem.
Well may my Fortunes hale this instrument
Of Soul o'er new strange regions wide and side,
Offered to winds and watery element:
But hence my Spirit, by you 'companied,
Borne on the nimble wings that Reverie lent,
Flies home and bathes her, Waters! in your tide.

THOMAS CAMPBELL

(1777-1844)

[Illustration: THOMAS CAMPBELL]

The life of Thomas Campbell, though in large measure fortunate,
was uneventful. It was not marked with such brilliant successes as
followed the career of Scott; nor was fame purchased at the price of
so much suffering and error as were paid for their laurels by Byron,
Shelley, and Burns; but his star shone with a clear and steady ray,
from the youthful hours that saw his first triumph until near life's
close. The world's gifts--the poet's fame, and the public honors
and rewards that witnessed to it--were given with a generous hand;
and until the death of a cherished wife and the loss of his two
children--sons, loved with a love beyond the common love of
fathers--broke the charm, Campbell might almost have been taken
as a type of the happy man of letters.

Thomas Campbell was born in Glasgow, July 27th, 1777. His family
connection was large and respectable, and the branch to which he
belonged had been settled for many years in Argyleshire, where they
were called the Campbells of Kirnan, from an estate on which the
poet's grandfather resided and where he died. His third son,
Alexander, the father of the poet, was at one time the head of a firm
in Glasgow, doing a profitable business with Falmouth in Virginia; but
in common with almost all merchants engaged in the American trade, he
was ruined by the War of the Revolution. At the age of sixty-five he
found himself a poor man, involved in a costly suit in chancery, which
was finally decided against him, and with a wife and nine children
dependent upon him. All that he had to live on, at the time his son
Thomas was born, was the little that remained to him of his small
property when the debts were paid, and some small yearly sums from two
provident societies of which he was a member. The poet was fortunate
in his parents: both of them were people of high character, warmly
devoted to their children, whose education was their chief
care,--their idea of education including the training of the heart and
the manners as well as the mind.

When eight years old Thomas was sent to the grammar school at Glasgow,
where he began the study of Latin and Greek. "I was so early devoted
to poetry," he writes, "that at ten years old, when our master, David
Allison, interpreted to us the first Eclogue of Virgil, I was
literally thrilled with its beauty. In my thirteenth year I went to
the University of Glasgow, and put on the red gown. The joy of the
occasion made me unable to eat my breakfast. Whether it was
presentiment or the mere castle-building of my vanity, I had even then
a day-dream that I should one day be Lord Rector of the university."

As a boy, Campbell gained a considerable familiarity with the Latin
and Greek poets usually read in college, and was always more inclined
to pride himself on his knowledge of Greek poetry than on his own
reputation in the art. His college life was passed in times of great
political excitement. Revolution was in the air, and all youthful
spirits were aflame with enthusiasm for the cause of liberty and with
generous sympathy for oppressed people, particularly the Poles and the
Greeks. Campbell was caught by the sacred fire which later was to
touch the lips of Byron and Shelley; and in his earliest published
poem his interest in Poland, which never died out from his heart,
found its first expression. This poem, 'The Pleasures of Hope,' a work
whose title was thenceforth to be inseparably associated with its
author's name, was published in 1799, when Campbell was exactly
twenty-one years and nine months old. It at once placed him high in
public favor, though it met with the usual difficulty experienced by a
first poem by an unknown writer, in finding a publisher. The copyright
was finally bought by Mundell for sixty pounds, to be paid partly in
money and partly in books. Three years after the publication, a London
publisher valued it as worth an annuity of two hundred pounds for
life; and Mundell, disregarding his legal rights, behaved with so much
liberality that from the sale of the first seven editions Campbell
received no less than nine hundred pounds. Besides this material
testimony to its success, scores of anecdotes show the favor with
which it was received by the poets and writers of the time. The
greatest and noblest of them all, Walter Scott, was most generous in
his welcome. He gave a dinner in Campbell's honor, and introduced him
to his friends with a bumper to the author of 'The Pleasures of Hope.'

It seemed the natural thing for a young man so successfully launched
in the literary coteries of Edinburgh and Glasgow to pursue his
advantage in the larger literary world of London. But Campbell judged
himself with humorous severity. "At present," he writes in a letter,
"I am a raw Scotch lad, and in a company of wits and geniuses would
make but a dull figure with my northern brogue and my 'braw Scotch
boos.'" The eyes of many of the young men of the time were turned
toward Germany, where Goethe and Schiller, Lessing and Wieland, were
creating the golden age of their country's literature; and Campbell,
full of youthful hope and enthusiasm, and with a little money in his
pocket, determined to visit the Continent before settling down to work
in London. In 1800 he set out for Ratisbon, which he reached three
days before the French entered it with their army. His stay there was
crowded with picturesque and tragic incidents, described in his
letters to friends at home--"in prose," as his biographer justly says,
"which even his best poetry hardly surpasses." From the roof of the
Scotch Benedictine Convent of St. James, where Campbell was often
hospitably entertained while in Ratisbon, he saw the battle of
Hohenlinden, on which he wrote the poem once familiar to every
schoolboy. Wearied with the bloody sights of war, he left Ratisbon and
the next year returned to England. While living at Altona he wrote no
less than fourteen of his minor poems, but few of these escaped the
severity of his final judgment when he came to collect his verses for
publication. Among these few the best were 'The Exile of Erin' and the
noble ode 'Ye Mariners of England,' the poem by which alone, perhaps,
his name deserves to live; though 'The Battle of the Baltic' in its
original form 'The Battle of Copenhagen'--unfortunately not the one
best known--is well worthy of a place beside it.

On his return from the Continent, Campbell found himself received in
the warmest manner, not only in the literary world but in circles
reckoned socially higher. His poetry hit the taste of all the classes
that go to make up the general reading public; his harp had many
strings, and it rang true to all the notes of patriotism, humanity,
love, and feeling. "His happiest moments at this period," says his
biographer, "seem to have been passed with Mrs. Siddons, the Kembles,
and his friend Telford, the distinguished engineer, for whom he
afterward named his eldest son." Lord Minto, on his return from
Vienna, became much interested in Campbell and insisted on his taking
up his quarters for the season in his town-house in Hanover Square.
When the season was over Lord Minto went back to Scotland, taking the
poet with him as traveling companion. At Castle Minto, Campbell found
among other visitors Walter Scott, and it was while there that
'Lochiel's Warning' was composed and 'Hohenlinden' revised, and both
poems prepared for the press.

In 1803 Campbell married his cousin, Matilda Sinclair. The marriage
was a happy one; Washington Irving speaks of the lady's personal
beauty, and says that her mental qualities were equally matched with
it. "She was, in fact," he adds, "a more suitable wife for a poet than
poets' wives are apt to be; and for once a son of song had married a
reality and not a poetical fiction."

For seventeen years he supported himself and his family by what was
for the most part task-work, not always well paid, and made more
onerous by the poor state of his health. In 1801 Campbell's father
died, an old man of ninety-one, and with him ceased the small
benevolent-society pensions that, with what Thomas and the eldest son
living in America could contribute, had hitherto kept the parents in
decent comfort. But soon after Thomas's marriage and the birth of his
first child, the American brother failed, so that the pious duty of
supporting the aged mother now came upon the poet alone. He accepted
the addition to his burden as manfully as was to be expected of so
generous a nature, but there is no doubt that he was in great poverty
for a few years. Although often despondent, and with good reason, his
natural cheerfulness and his good sense always came to the rescue, and
in his lowest estate he retained the respect and the affection of his
many friends.

In 1805 Campbell received a pension of L200, which netted him, when
fees and expenses were deducted, L168 a year. Half of this sum he
reserved for himself and the remainder he divided between his mother
and his two sisters. In 1809 he published 'Gertrude of Wyoming,' which
had been completed the year before. It was hailed with delight in
Edinburgh and with no less favor in London, and came to a second
edition in the spring of 1810. But like most of Campbell's more
pretentious poetry, it has failed to keep its place in the world's
favor. The scene of the poem is laid in an impossible Pennsylvania
where the bison and the beaver, the crocodile, the condor, and the
flamingo, live in happy neighborhood in groves of magnolia and olive;
while the red Indian launches his pirogue upon the Michigan to hunt
the bison, while blissful shepherd swains trip with maidens to the
timbrel, and blue-eyed Germans change their swords to pruning-hooks,
Andalusians dance the saraband, poor Caledonians drown their homesick
cares in transatlantic whisky, and Englishmen plant fair Freedom's
tree! The story is as unreal as the landscape, and it is told in a
style more labored and artificial by far than that of Pope, to whom
indeed the younger poet was often injudiciously compared. Yet it is to
be noted that Campbell's prose style was as direct and unaffected as
could be wished, while in his two best lyrical poems, 'Ye Mariners of
England,' and the first cast of 'The Battle of the Baltic,' he shows a
vividness of conception and a power of striking out expression at
white heat in which no one of his contemporaries excelled him.

Campbell was deservedly a great favorite in society, and the story
of his life at this time is largely the record of his meeting with
distinguished people. The Princess of Wales freely welcomed him to her
court; he had corresponded with Madame de Stael, and when she came to
England he visited her often and at her request read her his lectures
on poetry; he saw much of Mrs. Siddons, and when in Paris in 1814,
visited the Louvre in her company to see the statues and pictures of
which Napoleon had plundered Italy.

In 1826 Campbell was made Lord Rector of Glasgow University, and in
1828 he was re-elected unanimously. During this second term his wife
died, and in 1829 the unprecedented honor of an election for a third
term was bestowed upon him, although he had to dispute it with no less
a rival than Sir Walter Scott. "When he went to Glasgow to be
inaugurated as Lord Rector," says his biographer, "on reaching the
college green he found the boys pelting each other with snowballs. He
rushed into the melee and flung about his snowballs right and left
with great dexterity, much to the delight of the boys but to the great
scandal of the professors. He was proud of the piece of plate given
him by the Glasgow lads, but of the honor conferred by his college
title he was less sensible. He hated the sound of _Doctor_ Campbell,
and said to an acquaintance that no friend of his would ever call him
so."

The establishment through his direct agency of the University of
London was Campbell's most important public work. Later his life was
almost wholly engrossed for a time by his interest in the cause of
Poland--a cause indeed that from his youth had lain near his heart.
But as he grew older and his health declined he became more and more
restless, and finally in 1843 took up his residence at Boulogne. His
parents, his brothers and sisters, his wife, his two children, so
tenderly loved, were all gone. But he still corresponded with his
friends, and to the last his talk was cheerful and pleasant. In June,
1844, he died, and in July he was buried in Westminster Abbey in
Poets' Corner. About his grave stood Milman, the Duke of Argyle,--the
head of his clan,--Sir Robert Peel, Brougham, Lockhart, Macaulay,
D'Israeli, Horace Smith, Croly and Thackeray, with many others, and
when the words "Dust to dust" were pronounced, Colonel Szyrma, a
distinguished Pole, scattered over the coffin a handful of earth from
the grave of Kosciuszko at Cracow.

HOPE

From the 'Pleasures of Hope'

At summer eve, when Heaven's ethereal bow
Spans with bright arch the glittering hills below,
Why to yon mountain turns the musing eye,
Whose sunbright summit mingles with the sky?
Why do those cliffs of shadowy tint appear
More sweet than all the landscape smiling near?
'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.
Thus with delight we linger to survey
The promised joys of life's unmeasured way;
Thus, from afar, each dim-discovered scene
More pleasing seems than all the past hath been,
And every form that Fancy can repair
From dark oblivion glows divinely there.
What potent spirit guides the raptured eye
To pierce the shades of dim futurity?
Can Wisdom lend, with all her heavenly power,
The pledge of Joy's anticipated hour?
Ah no! she darkly sees the fate of man--
Her dim horizon bounded to a span;
Or if she hold an image to the view,
'Tis Nature pictured too severely true.
With thee, sweet Hope, resides the heavenly light
That pours remotest rapture on the sight;
Thine is the charm of life's bewildered way,
That calls each slumbering passion into play.
Waked by thy touch, I see the sister band,
On tiptoe watching, start at thy command,
And fly where'er thy mandate bids them steer,
To Pleasure's path or Glory's bright career....
Where is the troubled heart consigned to share
Tumultuous toils or solitary care,
Unblest by visionary thoughts that stray
To count the joys of Fortune's better day?
Lo! nature, life, and liberty relume
The dim-eyed tenant of the dungeon gloom;
A long-lost friend, or hapless child restored,
Smiles at his blazing hearth and social board;
Warm from his heart the tears of rapture flow,
And virtue triumphs o'er remembered woe.
Chide not his peace, proud Reason; nor destroy
The shadowy forms of uncreated joy,
That urge the lingering tide of life, and pour
Spontaneous slumber on his midnight hour.
Hark! the wild maniac sings, to chide the gale
That wafts so slow her lover's distant sail;
She, sad spectatress, on the wintry shore,
Watched the rude surge his shroudless corse that bore,
Knew the pale form, and shrieking in amaze,
Clasped her cold hands, and fixed her maddening gaze;
Poor widowed wretch! 'Twas there she wept in vain,
Till Memory fled her agonizing brain:--
But Mercy gave, to charm the sense of woe,
Ideal peace, that truth could ne'er bestow;
Warm on her heart the joys of Fancy beam,
And aimless Hope delights her darkest dream.
Oft when yon moon has climbed the midnight sky,
And the lone sea-bird wakes its wildest cry,
Piled on the steep, her blazing fagots burn
To hail the bark that never can return;
And still she waits, but scarce forbears to weep
That constant love can linger on the deep.

THE FALL OF POLAND

From the 'Pleasures of Hope'

O Sacred Truth! thy triumph ceased a while,
And Hope, thy sister, ceased with thee to smile,
When leagued Oppression poured to Northern wars
Her whiskered pandoors and her fierce hussars,
Waved her dread standard to the breeze of morn,
Pealed her loud drum, and twanged her trumpet horn;
Tumultuous horror brooded o'er her van,
Presaging wrath to Poland--and to man!
Warsaw's last champion from her height surveyed,
Wide o'er the fields, a waste of ruin laid--
O Heaven! he cried,--my bleeding country save!
Is there no hand on high to shield the brave?
Yet, though destruction sweep those lovely plains,
Rise, fellow-men! our country yet remains.
By that dread name, we wave the sword on high,
And swear for her to live! with her to die!
He said, and on the rampart-heights arrayed
His trusty warriors, few but undismayed;
Firm-paced and slow, a horrid front they form,
Still as the breeze, but dreadful as the storm;
Low murmuring sounds along their banners fly,
Revenge, or death--the watchword and reply;
Then pealed the notes, omnipotent to charm,
And the loud tocsin tolled their last alarm!
In vain, alas! in vain, ye gallant few!
From rank to rank your volleyed thunder flew;
Oh, bloodiest picture in the book of Time,
Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime;
Found not a generous friend, a pitying foe,
Strength in her arms, nor mercy in her woe!
Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear,
Closed her bright eye and curbed her high career;
Hope for a season bade the world farewell,
And Freedom shrieked, as Kosciusko fell!
The sun went down, nor ceased the carnage there;
Tumultuous Murder shook the midnight air--
On Prague's proud arch the fires of ruin glow,
His blood-dyed waters murmuring far below;
The storm prevails, the rampart yields a way,
Bursts the wild cry of horror and dismay!
Hark, as the smoldering piles with thunder fall,
A thousand shrieks for hopeless mercy call!
Earth shook--red meteors flashed along the sky,
And conscious Nature shuddered at the cry!
O righteous Heaven! ere Freedom found a grave,
Why slept the sword, omnipotent to save?
Where was thine arm, O Vengeance! where thy rod,
That smote the foes of Zion and of God;
That crushed proud Ammon, when his iron car
Was yoked in wrath, and thundered from afar?
Where was the storm that slumbered till the host
Of blood-stained Pharaoh left their trembling coast;
Then bade the deep in wild commotion flow,
And heaved an ocean on their march below?
Departed spirits of the mighty dead!
Ye that at Marathon and Leuctra bled!
Friends of the world! restore your swords to man,
Fight in his sacred cause, and lead the van;
Yet for Sarmatia's tears of blood atone,
And make her arm puissant as your own;
Oh! once again to Freedom's cause return
The patriot Tell, the Bruce of Bannockburn!

THE SLAVE

From the 'Pleasures of Hope'

And say, supernal Powers! who deeply scan
Heaven's dark decrees, unfathomed yet by man,--
When shall the world call down, to cleanse her shame,
That embryo spirit, yet without a name,
That friend of Nature, whose avenging hands
Shall burst the Libyan's adamantine bands?
Who, sternly marking on his native soil
The blood, the tears, the anguish and the toil,
Shall bid each righteous heart exult to see
Peace to the slave, and vengeance on the free!
Yet, yet, degraded men! th' expected day
That breaks your bitter cup is far away;
Trade, wealth, and fashion ask you still to bleed,
And holy men give Scripture for the deed;
Scourged and debased, no Briton stoops to save
A wretch, a coward--yes, because a slave!
Eternal Nature! when thy giant hand
Had heaved the floods and fixed the trembling land,
When life sprang startling at thy plastic call,
Endless thy forms, and man the lord of all:--
Say, was that lordly form inspired by thee,
To wear eternal chains and bow the knee?
Was man ordained the slave of man to toil,
Yoked with the brutes, and fettered to the soil,
Weighed in a tyrant's balance with his gold?
No! Nature stamped us in a heavenly mold!
She bade no wretch his thankless labor urge,
Nor, trembling, take the pittance and the scourge;
No homeless Libyan, on the stormy deep,
To call upon his country's name and weep!
Lo! once in triumph, on his boundless plain,
The quivered chief of Congo loved to reign;
With fires proportioned to his native sky,
Strength in his arm, and lightning in his eye;
Scoured with wild feet his sun-illumined zone,
The spear, the lion, and the woods, his own;
Or led the combat, bold without a plan,
An artless savage, but a fearless man.
The plunderer came;--alas! no glory smiles
For Congo's chief, on yonder Indian isles;
Forever fallen! no son of nature now,
With Freedom chartered on his manly brow.
Faint, bleeding, bound, he weeps the night away,
And when the sea-wind wafts the dewless day,
Starts, with a bursting heart, for evermore
To curse the sun that lights their guilty shore!
The shrill horn blew; at that alarum knell
His guardian angel took a last farewell.
That funeral dirge to darkness hath resigned
The fiery grandeur of a generous mind.
Poor fettered man! I hear thee breathing low
Unhallowed vows to Guilt, the child of Woe:
Friendless thy heart; and canst thou harbor there
A wish but death--a passion but despair?
The widowed Indian, when her lord expires,
Mounts the dread pile, and braves the funeral fires.
So falls the heart at Thraldom's bitter sigh;
So Virtue dies, the spouse of Liberty!

DEATH AND A FUTURE LIFE

From the 'Pleasures of Hope'

Unfading Hope! when life's last embers burn,
When soul to soul, and dust to dust return!
Heaven to thy charge resigns the awful hour.
Oh, then thy kingdom comes! Immortal Power!
What though each spark of earth-born rapture fly
The quivering lip, pale cheek, and closing eye,--
Bright to the soul thy seraph hands convey
The morning dream of life's eternal day--
Then, then the triumph and the trance begin,
And all the phoenix spirit burns within!
Oh deep-enchanting prelude to repose,
The dawn of bliss, the twilight of our woes!
Yet half I hear the panting spirit sigh,
It is a dread and awful thing to die!
Mysterious worlds, untraveled by the sun!
Where Time's far-wandering tide has never run,--
From your unfathomed shades and viewless spheres,
A warning comes, unheard by other ears.
'Tis Heaven's commanding trumpet, long and loud,
Like Sinai's thunder, pealing from the cloud!
While Nature hears, with terror-mingled trust,
The shock that hurls her fabric to the dust;
And like the trembling Hebrew, when he trod
The roaring waves, and called upon his God,
With mortal terrors clouds immortal bliss,
And shrieks, and hovers o'er the dark abyss!
Daughter of Faith, awake, arise, illume
The dread unknown, the chaos of the tomb;
Melt and dispel, ye spectre doubts, that roll
Cimmerian darkness o'er the parting soul!
Fly, like the moon-eyed herald of Dismay,
Chased on his night-steed by the star of day!
The strife is o'er--the pangs of Nature close,
And life's last rapture triumphs o'er her woes.
Hark! as the spirit eyes, with eagle gaze,
The noon of Heaven undazzled by the blaze,
On heavenly winds that waft her to the sky
Float the sweet tones of star-born melody;
Wild as that hallowed anthem sent to hail
Bethlehem's shepherds in the lonely vale,
When Jordan hushed his waves, and midnight still
Watched on the holy towers of Zion hill.
Soul of the just! companion of the dead!
Where is thy home, and whither art thou fled?
Back to its heavenly source thy being goes.
Swift as the comet wheels to whence he rose;
Doomed on his airy path a while to burn,
And doomed like thee to travel and return.
Hark! from the world's exploding centre driven,
With sounds that shook the firmament of Heaven,
Careers the fiery giant, fast and far,
On bickering wheels and adamantine car;
From planet whirled to planet more remote,
He visits realms beyond the reach of thought;
But wheeling homeward, when his course is run,
Curbs the red yoke, and mingles with the sun:
So hath the traveler of earth unfurled
Her trembling wings, emerging from the world;
And o'er the path by mortal never trod,
Sprung to her source, the bosom of her God!
Oh, lives there, Heaven, beneath thy dread expanse,
One hopeless, dark idolater of Chance,
Content to feed, with pleasures unrefined,
The lukewarm passions of a lowly mind,
Who, moldering earthward, reft of every trust,
In joyless union wedded to the dust,
Could all his parting energy dismiss,
And call this barren world sufficient bliss?
There live, alas! of heaven-directed mien,
Of cultured soul, and sapient eye serene,
Who hail thee, Man! the pilgrim of a day,
Spouse of the worm, and brother of the clay;
Frail as the leaf in Autumn's yellow bower,
Dust in the wind, or dew upon the flower;
A friendless slave, a child without a sire,
Whose mortal life and momentary fire
Light to the grave his chance-created form,
As ocean-wrecks illuminate the storm;
And when the guns' tremendous flash is o'er,
To-night and silence sink for evermore!
Are these the pompous tidings ye proclaim,
Lights of the world, and demigods of Fame?
Is this your triumph--this your proud applause,
Children of Truth, and champions of her cause?
For this hath Science searched, on weary wing,
By shore and sea, each mute and living thing?
Launched with Iberia's pilot from the steep,
To worlds unknown, and isles beyond the deep?
Or round the cope her living chariot driven,
And wheeled in triumph through the signs of Heaven?
O star-eyed Science, hast thou wandered there,
To waft us home the message of despair?
Then bind the palm, thy sage's brow to suit,
Of blasted leaf and death-distilling fruit.
Ah me! the laureled wreath that Murder rears,
Blood-nursed, and watered by the widow's tears,
Seems not so foul, so tainted, and so dread,
As waves the nightshade round the skeptic's head.
What is the bigot's torch, the tyrant's chain?
I smile on death, if Heavenward Hope remain!
But if the warring winds of Nature's strife
Be all the faithless charter of my life;
If Chance awaked, inexorable power,
This frail and feverish being of an hour;
Doomed o'er the world's precarious scene to sweep,
Swift as the tempest travels on the deep;
To know Delight but by her parting smile,
And toil, and wish, and weep a little while;--
Then melt, ye elements, that formed in vain
This troubled pulse and visionary brain!
Fade, ye wild flowers, memorials of my doom,
And sink, ye stars, that light me to the tomb!
Truth, ever lovely,--since the world began,
The foe of tyrants, and the friend of man,--
How can thy words from balmy slumber start
Reposing Virtue, pillowed on the heart!
Yet if thy voice the note of thunder rolled,
And that were true which Nature never told,
Let Wisdom smile not on her conquered field:
No rapture dawns, no treasure is revealed.
Oh! let her read, nor loudly, nor elate,
The doom that bars us from a better fate;
But, sad as angels for the good man's sin,
Weep to record, and blush to give it in!

LOCHIEL'S WARNING

WIZARD

Lochiel, Lochiel! beware of the day
When the Lowlands shall meet thee in battle array!
For a field of the dead rushes red on my sight,
And the clans of Culloden are scattered in fight.
They rally, they bleed, for their kingdom and crown;
Woe, woe to the riders that trample them down!
Proud Cumberland prances, insulting the slain,
And their hoof-beaten bosoms are trod to the plain.
But hark! through the fast-flashing lightning of war,
What steed to the desert flies frantic and far?
'Tis thine, O Glenullin! whose bride shall await,
Like a love-lighted watch-fire, all night at the gate.
A steed comes at morning; no rider is there;
But its bridle is red with the sign of despair.
Weep, Albin! to death and captivity led!
Oh weep! but thy tears cannot number the dead:
For a merciless sword on Culloden shall wave,
Culloden! that reeks with the blood of the brave.

LOCHIEL

Go, preach to the coward, thou death-telling seer!
Or, if gory Culloden so dreadful appear,
Draw, dotard, around thy old wavering sight
This mantle, to cover the phantoms of fright.

WIZARD

Ha! laugh'st thou, Lochiel, my vision to scorn?
Proud bird of the mountain, thy plume shall be torn!
Say, rushed the bold eagle exultingly forth,
From his home in the dark rolling clouds of the north?
Lo! the death-shot of foemen outspeeding, he rode
Companionless, bearing destruction abroad;
But down let him stoop from his havoc on high!
Ah! home let him speed,--for the spoiler is nigh.
Why flames the far summit? Why shoot to the blast
Those embers, like stars from the firmament cast?
'Tis the fire-shower of ruin, all dreadfully driven
From his eyrie, that beacons the darkness of heaven.
O crested Lochiel! the peerless in might,
Whose banners arise on the battlements' height,
Heaven's fire is around thee, to blast and to burn;
Return to thy dwelling! all lonely return!
For the blackness of ashes shall mark where it stood,
And a wild mother scream o'er her famishing brood.

LOCHIEL

False Wizard, avaunt! I have marshaled my clan;
Their swords are a thousand, their bosoms are one!
They are true to the last of their blood and their breath,
And like reapers descend to the harvest of death.
Then welcome be Cumberland's steed to the shock!
Let him dash his proud foam like a wave on the rock!
But woe to his kindred, and woe to his cause,
When Albin her claymore indignantly draws;
When her bonneted chieftains to victory crowd,
Clanronald the dauntless, and Moray the proud,
All plaided and plumed in their tartan array--

WIZARD

Lochiel, Lochiel! beware of the day;
For, dark and despairing, my sight I may seal,
But man cannot cover what God would reveal;
'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore,
And coming events cast their shadows before.
I tell thee, Culloden's dread echoes shall ring
With the bloodhounds that bark for thy fugitive king.
Lo! anointed by Heaven with the vials of wrath,
Behold, where he flies on his desolate path!
Now in darkness and billows, he sweeps from my sight:
Rise, rise! ye wild tempests, and cover his flight!
'Tis finished. Their thunders are hushed on the moors:
Culloden is lost, and my country deplores.
But where is the iron-bound prisoner? where?
For the red eye of battle is shut in despair.
Say, mounts he the ocean wave, banished, forlorn,
Like a limb from his country cast bleeding and torn?
Ah no! for a darker departure is near;
The war-drum is muffled, and black is the bier;
His death-bell is tolling: O Mercy, dispel
Yon sight, that it freezes my spirit to tell!
Life flutters convulsed in his quivering limbs,
And his blood-streaming nostril in agony swims.
Accursed be the fagots that blaze at his feet,
Where his heart shall be thrown ere it ceases to beat,
With the smoke of its ashes to poison the gale--

LOCHIEL

Down, soothless insulter! I trust not the tale:
For never shall Albin a destiny meet
So black with dishonor, so foul with retreat.
Though my perishing ranks should be strewed in their gore,
Like ocean-weeds heaped on the surf-beaten shore,
Lochiel, untainted by flight or by chains,
While the kindling of life in his bosom remains,
Shall victor exult, or in death be laid low,
With his back to the field, and his feet to the foe!
And, leaving in battle no blot on his name,
Look proudly to Heaven from the death-bed of fame.

THE SOLDIER'S DREAM

Our bugles sang truce--for the night-cloud had lowered,
And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;
And thousands had sunk on the ground overpowered,
The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die.

When reposing that night on my pallet of straw,
By the wolf-scaring fagot that guarded the slain,
At the dead of the night a sweet vision I saw,
And thrice ere the morning I dreamt it again.

Methought from the battle-field's dreadful array,
Far, far I had roamed on a desolate track:
'Twas Autumn,--and sunshine arose on the way
To the home of my fathers, that welcomed me back.

I flew to the pleasant fields traversed so oft
In life's morning march, when my bosom was young;
I heard my own mountain-goats bleating aloft,
And knew the sweet strain that the corn-reapers sung.

Then pledged we the wine-cup, and fondly I swore
From my home and my weeping friends never to part;
My little ones kissed me a thousand times o'er,
And my wife sobbed aloud in her fullness of heart.

"Stay, stay with us,--rest; thou art weary and worn!"
And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay:--
But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn,
And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.

LORD ULLIN'S DAUGHTER

A Chieftan, to the Highlands bound,
Cries, "Boatman, do not tarry!
And I'll give thee a silver pound,
To row us o'er the ferry."

"Now who be ye, would cross Lochgyle,
This dark and stormy water?"
"O, I'm the chief of Ulva's isle,
And this Lord Ullin's daughter.

"And fast before her father's men
Three days we've fled together;
For should he find us in the glen,
My blood would stain the heather.

"His horsemen hard behind us ride;
Should they our steps discover,
Then who will cheer my bonny bride
When they have slain her lover?"

Out spoke the hardy Highland wight,
"I'll go, my chief--I'm ready;--
It is not for your silver bright,
But for your winsome lady;

"And by my word! the bonny bird
In danger shall not tarry;
So though the waves are raging white
I'll row you o'er the ferry."

By this the storm grew loud apace,
The water-wraith was shrieking;
And in the scowl of heaven each face
Grew dark as they were speaking.

But still as wilder blew the wind,
And as the night grew drearer,
Adown the glen rode armed men,
Their trampling sounded nearer.

"O haste thee, haste!" the lady cries,
"Though tempests round us gather,
I'll meet the raging of the skies,
But not an angry father."

The boat has left a stormy land,
A stormy sea before her,
When, oh! too strong for human hand,
The tempest gathered o'er her.

And still they rowed amidst the roar
Of waters fast prevailing:
Lord Ullin reached that fatal shore;
His wrath was changed to wailing.

For sore dismayed, through storm and shade,
His child he did discover:
One lovely hand she stretched for aid,
And one was round her lover.

"Come back! come back!" he cried in grief,
"Across this stormy water;
And I'll forgive your Highland chief,
My daughter!--oh, my daughter!"

'Twas vain: the loud waves lashed the shore,
Return or aid preventing:--
The waters wild went o'er his child,
And he was left lamenting.

THE EXILE OF ERIN

There came to the beach a poor Exile of Erin,
The dew on his thin robe was heavy and chill;
For his country he sighed, when at twilight repairing
To wander alone by the wind-beaten hill;
But the day-star attracted his eye's sad devotion,
For it rose o'er his own native isle of the ocean,
Where once, in the fire of his youthful emotion,
He sang the bold anthem of _Erin go bragh_.

Sad is my fate! said the heart-broken stranger;
The wild deer and wolf to a covert can flee,
But I have no refuge from famine and danger.
A home and a country remain not to me.
Never again, in the green sunny bowers
Where my forefathers lived, shall I spend the sweet hours,
Or cover my harp with the wild-woven flowers,
And strike to the numbers of _Erin go bragh_!

Erin, my country! though sad and forsaken,
In dreams I revisit thy sea-beaten shore;
But, alas! in a far foreign land I awaken,
And sigh for the friends who can meet me no more!
O cruel fate! wilt thou never replace me
In a mansion of peace, where no perils can chase me?
Never again shall my brothers embrace me?
They died to defend me, or live to deplore!

Where is my cabin door, fast by the wildwood?
Sisters and sire! did ye weep for its fall?
Where is the mother that looked on my childhood?
And where is the bosom-friend, dearer than all?
Oh! my sad heart! long abandoned by pleasure,
Why did it dote on a fast fading treasure?
Tears, like the raindrop, may fall without measure,
But rapture and beauty they cannot recall.

Yet all its sad recollections suppressing,
One dying wish my lone bosom can draw:
Erin! an exile bequeaths thee his blessing!
Land of my forefathers! _Erin go bragh_!
Buried and cold, when my heart stills her motion,
Green be thy fields, sweetest isle of the ocean!
And thy harp-striking bards sing aloud with devotion--
Erin mavournin--_Erin go bragh_!

YE MARINERS OF ENGLAND

Ye Mariners of England!
That guard our native seas;
Whose flag has braved, a thousand years,
The battle and the breeze!
Your glorious standard launch again
To match another foe!
And sweep through the deep,
While the stormy winds do blow;
While the battle rages loud and long,
And the stormy winds do blow.

The spirit of your fathers
Shall start from every wave!--
For the deck it was their field of fame,
And Ocean was their grave:
Where Blake and mighty Nelson fell,
Your manly hearts shall glow,
As ye sweep through the deep,
While the stormy winds do blow;
While the battle rages loud and long,
And the stormy winds do blow.

Britannia needs no bulwark,
No towers along the steep;
Her march is o'er the mountain-waves,
Her home is on the deep.
With thunders from her native oak
She quells the floods below,--
As they roar on the shore,
When the stormy winds do blow;
When the battle rages loud and long,
And the stormy winds do blow.

The meteor flag of England
Shall yet terrific burn,
Till danger's troubled night depart,
And the star of peace return.
Then, then, ye ocean-warriors!
Our song and feast shall flow
To the fame of your name,
When the storm has ceased to blow;
When the fiery fight is heard no more,
And the storm has ceased to blow.

HOHENLINDEN

On Linden, when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay th' untrodden snow;
And dark as winter was the flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly.

But Linden saw another sight,
When the drum beat, at dead of night,
Commanding fires of death to light
The darkness of her scenery.

By torch and trumpet fast arrayed,
Each horseman drew his battle-blade,
And furious every charger neighed,
To join the dreadful revelry.

Then shook the hills with thunder riven,
Then rushed the steed to battle driven,
And louder than the bolts of heaven
Far flashed the red artillery.

But redder yet that light shall glow
On Linden's hills of stained snow,
And bloodier yet the torrent flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly.

'Tis morn, but scarce yon level sun
Can pierce the war-clouds, rolling dun,
Where furious Frank and fiery Hun
Shout in their sulph'rous canopy.

The combat deepens. On, ye brave,
Who rush to glory or the grave!
Wave, Munich! all thy banners wave,
And charge with all thy chivalry!

Few, few shall part where many meet!
The snow shall be their winding-sheet,
And every turf beneath their feet
Shall be a soldier's sepulchre.

[Illustration: HOHENLINDEN.

Photogravure from a painting by Meissonier.

The battle of Hohenlinden, commemorated by Campbell's lyric,
was fought Dec. 3, 1800. The French under Moreau defeated the
Austrians under the Archduke John.]

THE BATTLE OF COPENHAGEN

Of Nelson and the North
Sing the day!
When, their haughty powers to vex,
He engaged the Danish decks,
And with twenty floating wrecks
Crowned the fray!

All bright, in April's sun,
Shone the day!
When a British fleet came down
Through the islands of the crown,
And by Copenhagen town
Took their stay.

In arms the Danish shore
Proudly shone;
By each gun the lighted brand,
In a bold determined hand,
And the Prince of all the land
Led them on!

For Denmark here had drawn
All her might!
From her battle-ships so vast
She had hewn away the mast,
And at anchor to the last
Bade them fight!

Another noble fleet
Of their line
Rode out, but these were naught
To the batteries, which they brought,
Like Leviathans afloat,
In the brine.

It was ten of Thursday morn,
By the chime;
As they drifted on their path
There was silence deep as death,
And the boldest held his breath
For a time--

Ere a first and fatal round
Shook the flood;
Every Dane looked out that day,
Like the red wolf on his prey,
And he swore his flag to sway
O'er our blood.

Not such a mind possessed
England's tar;
'Twas the love of noble game
Set his oaken heart on flame,
For to him 'twas all the same--
Sport and war.

All hands and eyes on watch,
As they keep;
By their motion light as wings,
By each step that haughty springs,
You might know them for the kings
Of the deep!

'Twas the Edgar first that smote
Denmark's line;
As her flag the foremost soared,
Murray stamped his foot on board,
And an hundred cannons roared
At the sign!

Three cheers of all the fleet
Sung huzza!
Then, from centre, rear, and van,
Every captain, every man,
With a lion's heart began
To the fray.

Oh, dark grew soon the heavens--
For each gun
From its adamantine lips
Spread a death-shade round the ships,
Like a hurricane eclipse
Of the sun.

Three hours the raging fire
Did not slack;
But the fourth, their signals drear
Of distress and wreck appear,
And the Dane a feeble cheer
Sent us back.

The voice decayed, their shots
Slowly boom.
They ceased--and all is wail,
As they strike the shattered sail,
Or in conflagration pale
Light the gloom.

Oh death!--it was a sight
Filled our eyes!
But we rescued many a crew
From the waves of scarlet hue,
Ere the cross of England flew
O'er her prize.

Why ceased not here the strife,
O ye brave?
Why bleeds old England's band,
By the fire of Danish land,
That smites the very hand
Stretched to save?

But the Britons sent to warn
Denmark's town;
Proud foes, let vengeance sleep;
If another chain-shot sweep,
All your navy in the deep
Shall go down!

Then, peace instead of death
Let us bring!
If you'll yield your conquered fleet,
With the crews, at England's feet,
And make submission meet
To our king!

Then death withdrew his pall
From the day;
And the sun looked smiling bright
On a wide and woful sight,
Where the fires of funeral light
Died away.

Yet all amidst her wrecks,
And her gore,
Proud Denmark blest our chief
That he gave her wounds relief;
And the sounds of joy and grief
Filled her shore.

All round, outlandish cries
Loudly broke;
But a nobler note was rung,
When the British, old and young.
To their bands of music sung
'Hearts of Oak!'

Cheer! cheer! from park and tower,
London town!
When the King shall ride in state
From St. James's royal gate,
And to all his peers relate
Our renown!

The bells shall ring! the day
Shall not close,
But a blaze of cities bright
Shall illuminate the night,
And the wine-cup shine in light
As it flows!

Yet--yet--amid the joy
And uproar,
Let us think of them that sleep
Full many a fathom deep
All beside thy rocky steep,
Elsinore!

Brave hearts, to Britain's weal
Once so true!
Though death has quenched your flame,
Yet immortal be your name!
For ye died the death of fame
With Riou!

Soft sigh the winds of heaven
O'er your grave!
While the billow mournful rolls,
And the mermaid's song condoles,
Singing--"Glory to the souls
Of the brave!"

FROM THE 'ODE TO WINTER'

But howling winter fled afar,
To hills that prop the polar star,
And loves on deer-borne car to ride
With barren Darkness by his side,
Round the shore where loud Lofoden
Whirls to death the roaring whale,
Round the hall where Runic Odin
Howls his war-song to the gale;
Save when adown the ravaged globe
He travels on his native storm,
Deflowering Nature's grassy robe,
And trampling on her faded form:--
Till light's returning lord assume
The shaft that drives him to his polar field;
Of power to pierce his raven plume
And crystal-covered shield.
O sire of storms! whose savage ear
The Lapland drum delights to hear,
When Frenzy with her bloodshot eye
Implores thy dreadful deity.
Archangel! power of desolation!
Fast descending as thou art,
Say, hath mortal invocation
Spells to touch thy stony heart?
Then, sullen Winter, hear my prayer,
And gently rule the ruined year;
Nor chill the wanderer's bosom bare,
Nor freeze the wretch's falling tear;--
To shuddering Want's unmantled bed
Thy horror-breathing agues cease to lead,
And gently on the orphan head
Of innocence descend,--
But chiefly spare, O king of clouds!
The sailor on his airy shrouds;
When wrecks and beacons strew the steep,
And spectres walk along the deep.
Milder yet thy snowy breezes
Pour on yonder tented shores,
Where the Rhine's broad billow freezes,
Or the dark-brown Danube roars.

CAMPION

(-1619)

BY ERNEST RHYS

Dr. Thomas Campion, lyric poet, musician, and doctor of
medicine,--who, of the three liberal arts that he practiced, is
remembered now mainly for his poetry,--was born about the middle of
the sixteenth century; the precise date and place being unknown. It
has been conjectured that he came of an Essex family; but the evidence
for this falls through. Nor was he, as has been ingeniously supposed,
of any relationship to his namesake Edmund Campion, the Jesuit. What
is certain, and thrice interesting in the case of such a poet, is that
he was so nearly a contemporary of Shakespeare's. He was living in
London all through the period of Shakespeare's mastery of the English
stage, and survived him only by some three or four years. From an
entry in the register of St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, Fleet Street, we
learn that Campion was buried there in February, 1619-20. But although
it is clear that the two poets, one the most famous, the other
well-nigh the least known, in the greater Elizabethan galaxy, must
have often encountered in the narrower London of that day, there is no
single reference in the lives or works of either connecting one with
the other.

We first hear of Campion at Gray's Inn, where he was admitted a member
in 1586, from which it is clear that his first idea was to go in for
law. He tired of it before he was called to the bar, however; and
turning to medicine instead, he seems to have studied for his M.D. at
Cambridge, and thereafter repaired again to London and begun to
practice as a physician,--very successfully, as the names of some of
his more distinguished patients show. A man of taste, in the very
finest sense,--cultured, musical, urbane,--his own Latin epigrams
alone would show that he had all that social instinct and tact which
count for so much in a doctor's career. He was fortunate, too, in
finding in London the society best adapted to stimulate his finely
intellectual and artistic faculty. The first public sign of his
literary art was his book of 'Poemata,' the Latin epigrams referred
to, which appeared in 1595, and every copy of which has disappeared.
Fortunately a second series of epigrams, written in maturer years,
gave him an excuse to republish the first series in connection with
them, in the year of his death, 1619. From the two series we learn
many interesting facts about his circle of friends and himself, and
the evident ease and pleasantness of his life, late and early. There
is the same sense of style in his Latin verse that one finds in his
English lyrics; but though he had a pretty wit, with a sufficient salt
in it on occasion,--as in his references to Barnabe Barnes,--his
faculty was clearly more lyrical than epigrammatical, and his lyric
poems are all that an exacting posterity is likely to allow him to
carry up the steep approach to the House of Fame.

His earliest collection of these exquisite little poems was not issued
under his own name, but under that of Philip Rosetter the musician,
who wrote the music for half the book; the other half being of
Campion's own composition. This, the first of the delightful set of
old music-books which are the only source we have to draw upon for his
lyric poems, was published in 1601. There is no doubt that for many
years previous to this, Campion had been in the habit of writing both
the words and music of such songs for the private delectation of his
friends and himself. Some of his very finest lyrics, as memorable as
anything he has given us, appear in this first volume of 1601.

The second collection of Campion's songs was published, this time
under his own name, probably in 1613. It is entitled 'Two Books of
Airs'; the first, 'Divine and Moral Songs,' which include some of the
finest examples of their kind in all English literature; the second
book, 'Light Conceits of Lovers,' is very well described by its title,
containing many sweetest love-songs. We have not yet exhausted the
list of Campion's music-books. In 1617 two more, 'The Third & Fourth
Books of Airs,' were published in another small folio; and these again
afford songs fine enough for any anthology. Meanwhile we have passed
by all his Masques, which are among the prettiest of their kind, and
as full of lyrical moments as of picturesque effects. The first was
performed at Whitehall for the marriage of "my Lord Hayes" (Sir James
Hay), on Twelfth Night, 1606-7. Three more were written by Campion in
1613; and in the same year he published his 'Songs of Mourning,'
prompted by the untimely death of the promising young Prince Henry,
which had taken place in November, 1612. These songs, which do not
show Campion at his best, were set to music by Copario (alias John
Cooper). This completes the list of Campion's poetry; but besides his
actual practice in the arts of poetry and music, he wrote on the
theory of both. His interesting 'Observations in the Art of English
Poesie' (1602) resolves itself into a naive attack upon the use of
rhyme in poetry, which comes paradoxically enough from one who was
himself so exquisite a rhymer, and which called forth a very
convincing reply in Daniel's 'Defence of Rhyme.' The 'Observations'
contain some very taking examples of what may be done in the lyric
form, without rhyme. Campion's musical pamphlet is less generally
interesting, since counterpoint, on which he offered some practical
rules, and the theory of music, have traveled so far since he wrote.
It remains only to add that Campion remained in the limbo of forgotten
poets from his own day until ours, when Professor Arber and Mr. A. H.
Bullen in their different anthologies and editions rescued him for us.
Mr. Bullen's privately printed volume of his works appeared in 1889.
The present writer has more recently (1896) edited a very full
selection of the lyrics in the 'Lyric Poets' series. Campion's fame,
without doubt, is destined to grow steadily from this time forth,
based as it is on poems which so perfectly and exquisitely satisfy the
lyric sense and the lyric relationship between music and poetry.

[Signature: Ernest Rhys]

A HYMN IN PRAISE OF NEPTUNE

Of Neptune's empire let us sing,
At whose command the waves obey;
To whom the rivers tribute pay,
Down the high mountains sliding;
To whom the scaly nation yields
Homage for the crystal fields
Wherein they dwell;
And every sea-god pays a gem
Yearly out of his wat'ry cell,
To deck great Neptune's diadem.

The Tritons dancing in a ring
Before his palace gates do make
The water with their echoes quake,
Like the great thunder sounding:
The sea-nymphs chant their accents shrill,
And the Syrens, taught to kill
With their sweet voice,
Make every echoing rock reply,
Unto their gentle murmuring noise,
The praise of Neptune's empery.

From 'Ward's English Poets.'

OF CORINNA'S SINGING

When to her lute Corinna sings,
Her voice revives the leaden strings,
And doth in highest notes appear
As any challenged echo clear.
But when she doth of mourning speak,
E'en with her sighs the strings do break.
And as her lute doth live and die,
Led by her passions, so must I:
For when of pleasure she doth sing,
My thoughts enjoy a sudden spring;
But if she do of sorrow speak,
E'en from my heart the strings do break.

From 'Ward's English Poets'

FROM 'DIVINE AND MORAL SONGS'

(A. H. Bullen's modern text)

Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore,
Never tired pilgrim's limbs affected slumber more.
Than my wearied sprite now longs to fly out of my troubled breast.
O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soul to rest!

Ever blooming are the joys of heaven's high Paradise;
Cold age deafs not there our ears, nor vapor dims our eyes:
Glory there the sun outshines, whose beams the Blessed only see.
O come quickly, glorious Lord, and raise my sprite to Thee!

TO A COQUETTE

(A. H. Bullen's modern text)

When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arrived, a new admired guest,
The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round,
White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,
To hear the stories of thy finished love
From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;

Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights,
Of masques and revels which sweet youth did make,
Of tourneys and great challenges of knights,
And all these triumphs for thy beauty's sake:
When thou hast told these honors done to thee,
Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me.

SONGS FROM 'LIGHT CONCEITS OF LOVERS'

Where shee her sacred bowre adornes,
The Rivers clearely flow;
The groves and medowes swell with flowres,
The windes all gently blow.
Her Sunne-like beauty shines so fayre,
Her Spring can never fade;
Who then can blame the life that strives
To harbour in her shade?

Her grace I sought, her love I wooed;
Her love though I obtaine,
No time, no toyle, no vow, no faith,
Her wished grace can gaine.
Yet truth can tell my heart is hers,
And her will I adore;
And from that love when I depart,
Let heav'n view me no more!

GIVE beauty all her right,--
She's not to one forme tyed;
Each shape yeelds faire delight,
Where her perfections bide.
Helen, I grant, might pleasing be;
And Ros'mond was as sweet as shee.

Some, the quicke eye commends;
Some, swelling lips and red;
Pale lookes have many friends,
Through sacred sweetnesse bred.
Medowes have flowres that pleasure move,
Though Roses are the flowres of love.

Free beauty is not bound
To one unmoved clime:
She visits ev'ry ground,
And favours ev'ry time.
Let the old loves with mine compare,
My Sov'raigne is as sweet and fair.

GEORGE CANNING

(1770-1827)

[Illustration: GEORGE CANNING]

The political history of this famous British statesman is told by
Robert Bell (1846), by F.H. Hill (English Worthies Series), and in
detail by Stapleton (his private secretary) in 'Political Life of
Canning.' He became a friend of Pitt in 1793, entered the House of
Commons in 1794, was made Under-Secretary of State in 1796, was
Treasurer of the Navy from 1804 to 1806, Minister for Foreign Affairs
from 1807 till 1809, Ambassador to Lisbon from 1814 to 1816, again at
the head of foreign affairs in 1822, and was made Premier in 1827,
dying under the labor of forming his Cabinet.

Soon after his birth in London, April 11th, 1770, his disinherited
father died in poverty, and his mother became an unsuccessful actress.
An Irish actor, Moody, took young Canning to his uncle, Stratford
Canning, in London, who adopted him and sent him to Eton, where he
distinguished himself for his wit and literary talent. With his
friends John and Robert Smith, John Hookham Frere, and Charles Ellis,
he published a school magazine called The Microcosm, which attracted
so much attention that Knight the publisher paid Canning L50 for the
copyright. It was modeled on the Spectator, ridiculed modes and
customs, and was a unique specimen of juvenile essay-writing. A fifth
edition of the Microcosm was published in 1825. Subsequently Canning
studied at Oxford. He died August 8th, 1827, at Chiswick (the
residence of the Duke of Devonshire), in the same room and at the same
age as Fox, and under similar circumstances; and he was buried in
Westminster Abbey by the side of William Pitt.

It was not until 1798 that he obtained his great reputation as a
statesman and orator. Every one agrees that his literary eloquence,
wit, beauty of imagery, taste, and clearness of reasoning, were
extraordinary. Byron calls him "a genius--almost a universal one; an
orator, a wit, a poet, and a statesman." As a public speaker, we may
picture him from Lord Dalling's description:--

"Every day, indeed, leaves us fewer of those who remember the
clearly chiseled countenance, which the slouched hat only
slightly concealed; the lip satirically curled; the
penetrating eye, peering along the Opposition benches, of
the old Parliamentary leader in the House of Commons. It is
but here and there that we find a survivor of the old days to
speak to us of the singularly mellifluous and sonorous voice,
the classical language,--now pointed with epigram, now
elevated into poetry, now burning with passion, now rich with
humor,--which curbed into still attention a willing and
long-broken audience."

As a statesman his place is more dubious. Like every English
politician not born to a title, however,--Burke is an instance,--he
was ferociously abused as a mere mercenary adventurer because his
livelihood came from serving the public. The following lampoon
is a specimen; the chief sting lies not in Canning's insolent
mockery,--"Every time he made a speech he made a new and permanent
enemy," it was said of him,--but in his not being a rich nobleman.

THE UNBELOVED

Not a woman, child, or man in
All this isle that loves thee, Canning.
Fools, whom gentle manners sway,
May incline to Castlereagh;
Princes who old ladies love
Of the Doctor[A] may approve;
Chancery lords do not abhor
Their chatty, childish Chancellor;
In Liverpool, some virtues strike,
And little Van's beneath dislike.
But thou, unamiable object,
Dear to neither prince nor subject,
Veriest, meanest scab for pelf
Fastening on the skin of Guelph,
Thou, thou must surely _loathe thyself_.

[A] Addington.

But his dominant taste was literary. His literature helped him to
the field of statesmanship; as a compensation, his statesmanship is
obscured by his literature. Bell says of him:--

"Canning's passion for literature entered into all his
pursuits. It colored his whole life. Every moment of leisure
was given up to books. He and Pitt were passionately fond of
the classics, and we find them together of an evening after a
dinner at Pitt's, poring over some old Grecian in a corner of
the drawing-room while the rest of the company are dispersed
in conversation.... In English writings his judgment was pure
and strict; and no man was a more perfect master of all the
varieties of composition. He was the first English Minister
who banished the French language from our diplomatic
correspondence and indicated before Europe the copiousness
and dignity of our native tongue."

Part of the time that he was Foreign Secretary, Chateaubriand held the
like post for France, and Canning devoted much attention to giving his
diplomatic correspondence a literary polish which has made these
national documents famous. He also formed an intimate friendship with
Sir Walter Scott, founding with him and Ellis the Quarterly Review, to
which he contributed with the latter a humorous article on the bullion
question.

In literature Canning takes his place from his association with the
Anti-Jacobin, a newspaper established in 1797 under the secret
auspices of Pitt as a literary organ to express the policy of the
administration,--similar to the Rolliad, the Whig paper published a
few years before this date; but more especially to oppose
revolutionary sentiment and ridicule the persons who sympathized with
it. The house of Wright, its publisher in Piccadilly, soon became the
resort of the friends of the Ministry and the staff, which included
William Gifford, the editor,--author of the 'Baviad' and
'Maeviad,'--John Hookham Frere, George Ellis, Canning, Mr. Jenkinson
(afterward Earl of Liverpool), Lord Clare, Lord Mornington (afterward
Lord Wellesley), Lord Morpeth (afterward Earl of Carlisle), and
William Pitt, who contributed papers on finance.

The Anti-Jacobin lived through thirty-six weekly numbers, ending July
16th, 1796. Its essays and poetry have little significance to-day
except for those who can imagine the stormy political atmosphere of
the Reign of Terror, which threatened to extend its rule over the
whole of Europe. Hence the torrents of abuse and the violent attacks
upon any one tainted with the slightest Sans-culottic tone may be
understood.

The greater number of poems in the Anti-Jacobin are parodies, but not
exclusively political ones. The 'Loves of the Triangles' is a parody
on Dr. Erasmus Darwin's 'Loves of the Plants,' and contains an amusing
contest between Parabola, Hyperbola, and Ellipsis for the love of the
Phoenician Cone; the 'Progress of Man' is a parody of Payne Knight's
'Progress of Civil Society'; the 'Inscription for the Cell of Mrs.
Brownrigg' a parody of Southey; and 'The Rovers,' of which one scene
is given below, is a burlesque on the German dramas then in fashion.
This was written by Canning, Ellis, Frere, and Gifford, and the play
was given at Covent Garden in 1811 with great success, especially the
song of the captive Rogero. 'The Needy Knife-Grinder,' also quoted
below, a parody of Southey's 'Sapphics,' is by Canning and Frere. The
poetry of the Anti-Jacobin was collected and published by Charles
Edmonds (London, 1854), in a volume that contains also the original
verses which are exposed to ridicule. Canning's public speeches,
edited by R. Therry, were published in 1828.

ROGERO'S SOLILOQUY

From 'The Rovers; or the Double Arrangement'

ACT I

_The scene is a subterranean vault in the Abbey of
Quedlinburgh, with coffins, 'scutcheons, death's-heads, and
cross-bones; toads and other loathsome reptiles are seen
traversing the obscurer parts of the stage._--Rogero _appears,
in chains, in a suit of rusty armor, with his beard grown, and
a cap of a grotesque form upon his head; beside him a crock,
or pitcher, supposed to contain his daily allowance of
sustenance.--A long silence, during which the wind is heard to
whistle through the caverns._--Rogero _rises, and comes slowly
forward, with his arms folded._

ROGERO.--Eleven years! it is now eleven years since I was first
immured in this living sepulchre;--the cruelty of a Minister--the
perfidy of a Monk--yes, Matilda! for thy sake--alive amidst the
dead--chained--coffined--confined--cut off from the converse of my
fellow-men. Soft! what have we here! [_Stumbles over a bundle of
sticks._] This cavern is so dark that I can scarcely distinguish the
objects under my feet. Oh, the register of my captivity! Let me see;
how stands the account? [_Takes up the sticks and turns them over with
a melancholy air; then stands silent for a few minutes as if absorbed
in calculation._] Eleven years and fifteen days!--Hah! the
twenty-eighth of August! How does the recollection of it vibrate on my
heart! It was on this day that I took my last leave of Matilda. It was
a summer evening; her melting hand seemed to dissolve in mine as I
prest it to my bosom. Some demon whispered me that I should never see
her more. I stood gazing on the hated vehicle which was conveying her
away forever. The tears were petrified under my eyelids. My heart was
crystallized with agony. Anon I looked along the road. The diligence
seemed to diminish every instant; I felt my heart beat against its
prison, as if anxious to leap out and overtake it. My soul whirled
round as I watched the rotation of the hinder wheels. A long trail of
glory followed after her and mingled with the dust--it was the
emanation of Divinity, luminous with love and beauty, like the
splendor of the setting sun; but it told me that the sun of my joys
was sunk forever. Yes, here in the depths of an eternal dungeon, in
the nursing-cradle of hell, the suburbs of perdition, in a nest of
demons, where despair in vain sits brooding over the putrid eggs of
hope; where agony wooes the embrace of death; where patience, beside
the bottomless pool of despondency, sits angling for impossibilities.
Yet even _here_, to behold her, to embrace her! Yes, Matilda, whether
in this dark abode, amidst toads and spiders, or in a royal palace,
amidst the more loathsome reptiles of a court, would be indifferent to
me; angels would shower down their hymns of gratulation upon our
heads, while fiends would envy the eternity of suffering love--Soft;
what air was that? it seemed a sound of more than human warblings.
Again [_listens attentively for some minutes_]. Only the wind: it is
well, however; it reminds me of that melancholy air which has so often
solaced the hours of my captivity. Let me see whether the damps of
this dungeon have not yet injured my guitar. [_Takes his guitar, tunes
it, and begins the following air with a full accompaniment of violins
from the orchestra:--_]

[_Air, 'Lanterna Magica.'_]

SONG

Whene'er with haggard eyes I view
This dungeon that I'm rotting in,
I think of those companions true
Who studied with me at the U--
--niversity of Gottingen,
--niversity of Gottingen.

[_Weeps and pulls out a blue kerchief, with which he wipes his
eyes; gazing tenderly at it, he proceeds:--_]

Sweet kerchief, checked with heavenly blue,
Which once my love sat knotting in!--
Alas! Matilda _then_ was true!
At least I thought so at the U--
--niversity of Gottingen,
--niversity of Gottingen.

[_At the repetition of this line Rogero clanks his chains in
cadence._]

Barbs! barbs! alas! how swift you flew,
Her neat post-wagon trotting in!
Ye bore Matilda from my view;
Forlorn I languished at the U--
--niversity of Gottingen,
--niversity of Gottingen.

This faded form! this pallid hue!
This blood my veins is clotting in!
My years are many--they were few
When first I entered at the U--
--niversity of Gottingen,
--niversity of Gottingen.

There first for thee my passion grew,
Sweet, sweet Matilda Pottingen!
Thou wast the daughter of my Tu-
tor, law professor at the U--
--niversity of Gottingen,
--niversity of Gottingen.

[A]Sun, moon, and thou, vain world, adieu!
That kings and priests are plotting in:
Here doomed to starve on water gru--
el, never shall I see the U--
--niversity of Gottingen,
--niversity of Gottingen.

[_During the last stanza Rogero dashes his head repeatedly
against the walls of his prison, and finally so hard as to
produce a visible contusion. He then throws himself on the
floor in an agony. The curtain drops, the music still
continuing to play till it is wholly fallen._]

[A] This verse is said to have been added by the younger Pitt.

THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY AND THE KNIFE-GRINDER

FRIEND OF HUMANITY

Needy Knife-grinder! whither are you going?
Rough is the road; your wheel is out of order--
Bleak blows the blast; your hat has got a hole in't,
So have your breeches!

Weary Knife-grinder! little think the proud ones
Who in their coaches roll along the turnpike
Road, what hard work 'tis crying all day, "Knives and
Scissors to grind O!"

Tell me, Knife-grinder, how you came to grind knives?
Did some rich man tyrannically use you?
Was it some squire? or parson of the parish?
Or the attorney?

Was it the squire, for killing of his game? or
Covetous parson, for his tithes distraining?
Or roguish lawyer, made you lose your little
All in a lawsuit?

Have you not read the 'Rights of Man,' by Tom Paine?
Drops of compassion tremble on my eyelids,
Ready to fall, as soon as you have told your
Pitiful story.

KNIFE-GRINDER

Story? God bless you! I have none to tell, sir;
Only last night a-drinking at the Chequers,
This poor old hat and breeches, as you see, were
Torn in a scuffle.

Constables came up for to take me into
Custody; they took me before the justice;
Justice Oldmixon put me in the parish-
Stocks for a vagrant.

I should be glad to drink your honor's health in
A pot of beer, if you will give me sixpence;
But for my part, I never love to meddle
With politics, sir.

FRIEND OF HUMANITY

I give thee sixpence! I will see thee damned first--
Wretch! whom no sense of wrongs can rouse to vengeance!
Sordid, unfeeling, reprobate, degraded,
Spiritless outcast!

[_Kicks the Knife-grinder, overturns his wheel, and exit
in a transport of republican enthusiasm and universal
philanthropy._]

ON THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION

From the 'Speech on Parliamentary Reform'

Other nations, excited by the example of the liberty which this
country has long possessed, have attempted to copy our Constitution;
and some of them have shot beyond it in the fierceness of their
pursuit. I grudge not to other nations that share of liberty which
they may acquire: in the name of God, let them enjoy it! But let us
warn them that they lose not the object of their desire by the very
eagerness with which they attempt to grasp it. Inheritors and
conservators of rational freedom, let us, while others are seeking it
in restlessness and trouble, be a steady and shining light to guide
their course; not a wandering meteor to bewilder and mislead them.

Let it not be thought that this is an unfriendly or disheartening
counsel to those who are either struggling under the pressure of harsh
government, or exulting in the novelty of sudden emancipation. It is
addressed much rather to those who, though cradled and educated amidst
the sober blessings of the British Constitution, pant for other
schemes of liberty than those which that Constitution sanctions--other
than are compatible with a just equality of civil rights, or with the
necessary restraints of social obligation; of some of whom it may be
said, in the language which Dryden puts into the mouth of one of the
most extravagant of his heroes, that

"They would be free as Nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in the woods the noble savage ran."

Noble and swelling sentiments!--but such as cannot be reduced into
practice. Grand ideas!--but which must be qualified and adjusted by a
compromise between the aspirings of individuals and a due concern for
the general tranquillity;--must be subdued and chastened by reason and
experience, before they can be directed to any useful end! A search
after abstract perfection in government may produce in generous minds
an enterprise and enthusiasm to be recorded by the historian and to be
celebrated by the poet: but such perfection is not an object of
reasonable pursuit, because it is not one of possible attainment; and
never yet did a passionate struggle after an absolutely unattainable
object fail to be productive of misery to an individual, of madness
and confusion to a people. As the inhabitants of those burning
climates which lie beneath a tropical sun, sigh for the coolness of
the mountain and the grove; so (all history instructs us) do nations
which have basked for a time in the torrid blaze of an unmitigated
liberty, too often call upon the shades of despotism, even of military
despotism, to cover them,--

"--O quis me gelidis in vallibus Haemi
Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!"

a protection which blights while it shelters; which dwarfs the
intellect and stunts the energies of man, but to which a wearied
nation willingly resorts from intolerable heats and from perpetual
danger of convulsion.

Our lot is happily cast in the temperate zone of freedom, the clime
best suited to the development of the moral qualities of the human
race, to the cultivation of their faculties, and to the security as
well as the improvement of their virtues;--a clime not exempt, indeed,
from variations of the elements, but variations which purify while
they agitate the atmosphere that we breathe. Let us be sensible of the
advantages which it is our happiness to enjoy. Let us guard with pious
gratitude the flame of genuine liberty, that fire from heaven, of
which our Constitution is the holy depository; and let us not, for the
chance of rendering it more intense and more radiant, impair its
purity or hazard its extinction!

ON BROUGHAM AND SOUTH AMERICA

I now turn to that other part of the honorable and learned gentleman's
[Mr. Brougham's] speech; in which he acknowledges his acquiescence in
the passages of the address, echoing the satisfaction felt at the
success of the liberal commercial principles adopted by this country,
and at the steps taken for recognizing the new States of America. It
does happen, however, that the honorable and learned gentleman being
not unfrequently a speaker in this House, nor very concise in his
speeches, and touching occasionally, as he proceeds, on almost every
subject within the range of his imagination, as well as making some
observations on the matter in hand,--and having at different periods
proposed and supported every innovation of which the law or
Constitution of the country is susceptible,--it is impossible to
innovate without appearing to borrow from him. Either, therefore, we
must remain forever absolutely locked up as in a northern winter, or
we must break our way out by some mode already suggested by the
honorable and learned gentleman; and then he cries out, "Ah, I was
there before you! That is what I told you to do; but as you would not
do it then, you have no right to do it now."

In Queen Anne's reign there lived a very sage and able critic named
Dennis, who in his old age was the prey of a strange fancy that he had
himself written all the good things in all the good plays that were
acted. Every good passage he met with in any author he insisted was
his own. "It is none of his," Dennis would always say: "no, it's
mine!" He went one day to see a new tragedy. Nothing particularly good
to his taste occurred till a scene in which a great storm was
represented. As soon as he heard the thunder rolling over his head he
exclaimed, "That's my thunder!" So it is with the honorable and
learned gentleman: it's all his thunder. It will henceforth be
impossible to confer any boon, or make any innovation, but he will
claim it as his thunder.

But it is due to him to acknowledge that he does not claim everything;
he will be content with the exclusive merit of the liberal measures
relating to trade and commerce. Not desirous of violating his own
principles by claiming a monopoly of fore-sight and wisdom, he kindly
throws overboard to my honorable and learned friend [Sir J.
Mackintosh] near him, the praise of South America. I should like to
know whether, in some degree, this also is not his thunder. He thinks
it right itself; but lest we should be too proud if he approved our
conduct _in toto_, he thinks it wrong in point of time. I differ from
him essentially; for if I pique myself on anything in this affair, it
is the time. That at some time or other, States which had separated
themselves from the mother country should or should not be admitted to
the rank of independent nations, is a proposition to which no possible
dissent could be given. The whole question was one of time and mode.
There were two modes: one a reckless and headlong course by which we
might have reached our object at once, but at the expense of drawing
upon us consequences not lightly to be estimated; the other was more
strictly guarded in point of principle, so that while we pursued our
own interests, we took care to give no just cause of offense to other
Powers.

CESARE CANTU

(1805-1895)

Cesare Cantu, an Italian historian, was born at Brivio on the Adda,
December 2d, 1805. The eldest of ten children, he belonged to an old
though impoverished family. To obtain for him a gratuitous education
his parents destined him for the priesthood. On the death of his
father in 1827 he became the sole support of his mother, brothers, and
sisters. In 1825 he had made his appearance as a writer with a poem
entitled 'Algiso and the Lombard League.' His 'History of Como,'
following in 1829, gave him a standing in the world of letters.

Although not a member of the revolutionary society 'Young Italy,' he
was the confidant of two of its leaders, Albera and Balzetti, a
circumstance which led to his arrest in 1833. Seized by the Austrian
officials in the midst of his lecture at the Lyceum in Milan, he was
incarcerated in the prison in the Convent of Santa Margherita.
Although deprived of books and pen, he beguiled the time by writing
with a toothpick and candle-smoke on the back of a map and on scraps
of paper, 'Margherita Pusteria,' with one exception the most popular
historical novel in the Italian language.

Liberated at the end of a year, but deprived of his professorship, he
and his family would probably have starved had he not chanced to meet
a publisher who wanted a history of the world. The result of this
meeting was his 'Universal History' in thirty-five volumes (Turin,
1836 _et seq._), which has gone through forty editions and been
translated into many languages. It brought the publisher a fortune and
Cantu a modest independence.

Up to the time of his death in 1895, Cantu wrote almost without
intermission. Besides the books already mentioned, the most notable
are the 'History of a Hundred Years, 1750-1850' (1864), and the 'Story
of the Struggles for Italian Independence' (1873). His masterpiece is
the 'Universal History,' the best work of its kind in Italian and
perhaps in any language for lucidity and rapidity of narration, unity
of plan, justness of proportion, and literary art. It is however
written from the clerical point of view, and is not based on a
critical study of documentary sources. The political offenses for
which Cantu suffered persecution were his attempts to secure a federal
union of the Italian States under the hegemony of Austria and the
Papacy.

THE EXECUTION

From 'Margherita Pusterla'

The beautiful sunshine which one sees in Lombardy only at the season
of vintage, spread its white light and gentle warmth upon the sombre
facades of Broletto. The Piazza was packed with people; the balconies
and belvideres were filled with motley groups. Even ladies were
contending for the best places to see the horrible sight. One mother
showed her little boy all this preparation for death, and said to
him:--

"Do you see that man yonder with the long black beard and rough skin?
He devours bad boys in two mouthfuls: if you cry, he will carry you
off."

The frightened child tightly clasped his mother's neck with his small
arms, and hid his face in her breast. Another, half ashamed at being
seen there, asked, "Who is the victim?"

"It is," replied a neighboring stranger, "the wife of the man who was
beheaded yesterday."

"Ah, ah!" put in a third, "then it is the mother of the little boy who
was executed yesterday with Signor Pusterla?"

"How was that?" resumed the first speaker; "did they behead a child?"

"It is only too true," said a woman, joining in the conversation; "and
such a pretty little boy! Two blue eyes, bluer than the sky, and a
face as gentle and sweet as that of the Christ-child, and hair like
threads of gold. I came here to show my boy how the wicked are
punished, and as I stood near the scaffold, I heard and saw
everything!"

"Tell us, tell us, Mother Radegonda." And Radegonda, enchanted at
occupying the centre of attention, began.

"I will tell you," she said. "When he was there--but for the love of
charity, give me more room; you do not wish to stifle my little
Tanuccio?--Well, when he began to ascend the ladder, ah, see, the
child does not wish to go! He stamps his foot, he weeps, he cries--"

"I believe you," interrupted a person named Pizzabrasa, "for I heard
all the way from the Loggia dei Mercanti, where I was being crushed,
his cries of 'Papa! Mamma!'"

"That was it," continued Radegonda; "and he recoiled with horror
before that savage figure," she said, pointing with her forefinger to
Mastro Impicca. "His father sobbed, and could not speak; but his
confessor whispered in his ear--"

"I saw also," interrupted Pizzabrasa, determined to show that he had
been an eye-witness, and he continued:--"the golden hair of the child
soon mingled with the black hair and beard of the father. One would
have said they were yellow flames on a funeral pall. I also saw the
child caress the priest who talked to him, and the priest--"

"Who is the priest?" interrupted the first speaker. The question was
passed from lip to lip, until finally a man, dressed somewhat after
the ecclesiastical fashion and having a serene and devout face,
replied:--

"He is the one who preached at Lent last year at Santa-Maria del
Sacco. He could have converted Herod himself. But the world is so
wicked! He had no more success than if he had preached in the desert."

"His name?"

"Fra Buonvicino of the monastery Della Ricchezza de Brera. But the
riches that he covets are not those which one acquires in sewing
cloaks. Do you know him? Ah, what a man! question him, talk to him, he
knows everything, and--"

"But what did he say to the child?"--"And what did the child
say?"--"And the child's father, what did he do?"--It was thus they
interrupted the speaker, without listening to his eulogy.

Here Radegonda, regretting that she had been deposed from her throne,
took occasion to resume her speech, for no one was able to give more
details. She began again.

"Here, here," she said, "who is to talk, you or I? There are some
people who stick their noses everywhere and who--Now do you want to
know what the priest said? and how the poor condemned creature walked
with courage? and how in one instant he was in heaven in the company
of the angels?"

"And what did the child say?"

"The little child did not want to go along. He said:--'I know that it
is beautiful in Paradise, that the angels live there, and the kind
God, and there lives the good Madonna: but I would rather stay here
with Papa and Mamma; I would rather stay with them!' he repeated, and
cried."

"Sacred innocence!" exclaimed one of the listeners by an instinctive
compassion, and shed a few tears; but if any one had questioned him
regarding the justice of putting the child to death, he would have
unhesitatingly answered in the affirmative.

Our eloquent Radegonda continued:--

"But the priest! Is there any one here who did not see his face? Well,
you know how it looks when it rains and shines at the same time,--when
they say the Devil beats his wife,--that was the face of the good
monk. Tears large as the beads of a rosary ran down his cheeks, and at
the same time he had a smile like an angel.... He said to the boy,
'Your father goes with you to Paradise!' The child looked at him with
sad eyes, and asked, 'But Mamma?'--'Your mother,' replied the priest,
'will come with us.'--'If I stay on earth,' said the child, 'I must
then live without them?' The monk answered 'Yes'; and then the little
one consented to kneel."

Here sobs checked the course of the narrative; and the narrator was
half ashamed at being affected by the fate of the condemned ones, just
as a young lady is ashamed when she is caught weeping at the theatre.
Pizzabrasa concluded the recital:

"The child dropped upon his knees, and raised towards heaven his
little hands that were whiter than snow, and then the executioner cut
his hair and opened his great eyes to frighten him."

"How much I would have been willing to pay to have been present,"
exclaimed one of the group; "such affecting scenes delight me."

"Then why didn't you come?" asked a neighbor.

The other replied, "What do you think? I had to take to Saint-Victor a
saddle and bridle which I had mended."

And then with that indifference such compassionate souls have for the
sorrows of others which have affected them for a moment, they turned
the conversation on a thousand unrelated topics....

On the balconies, on the platforms, and in the magistrates' halls,
conversation of another description was held. Ladies and gentlemen of
high degree discussed arms and battles, inconstant favors of the
court, passage of birds, and the scarcity of hares; they demanded and
related news; and read from the books of this one and that one.
Signora Theodora, the young wife of Francesco dei Maggi, one of the
most famous beauties, asked in the most nonchalant way as she drew on
her gloves, "Who is this one about to be executed?"

"Margherita Visconti," replied Forestino, one of the sons of the Duke,
who was playing the gallant with all the ladies present.

"Visconti!" exclaimed the young woman. "She is then a relative of
Signor Vicario?"

"Yes, a distant relative," responded the young man.

But the jester Grillincervello interposed:--"She might have been a
nearer relative, but as she refused this, you see what has happened."

"She must regret her action," said another; "she is so young and
beautiful!"

"And then she is not accustomed to dying," put in the fool, a
reflection which caused peals of laughter around him.

Then he turned towards Forestino and his brother Bruzio, around whom
all had gathered in homage: "Serene Princes, it is my opinion that if
you wish to render attentions to the lady of Signor Franciscolo del
Maggi, she will not imitate Margherita."

At this moment the clock struck again. There was sullen silence--then
a second stroke--then a third, vibrating with a moribund horror.

"She has arrived?"

"No."

"Why is she so late?" was the universal question; for the spectators
were impatient, and imbued with expectation and curiosity, as if they
were in a theatre waiting for the curtain to rise.

"Perhaps they have pardoned her?" said one.

"Well, for my part, I should be glad." And the people seemed to find
as much pleasure in imagining a pardon as in watching the execution:
either way it gave them material for applause, emotion, criticism, and
discussion.

Soon all observations were interrupted, for upon the _parlera_, which
was covered with black cloth and velvet cushions, they saw appear the
magistrates, the podesta, his lieutenant, and finally the captain
Lucio. As I have told you, justice was then barbarous but honest, and
these men came to admire their work.

Through all the narrow streets, which terminated at this point, ran a
whisper; and the murmurs grew more excited towards the large gate
which gave entrance to the Pescheria Vecchia. Here was seen the
winding funeral procession, which made a long circuit to let the
multitude profit by the lesson.

"Here she is! Here she is!" they cried, and exactly like a regiment of
infantry in obedience to the commands of a sergeant, the entire crowd
stood on tiptoe, stretched their necks, and turned heads and eyes to
the scene.

Then appeared a yellow standard bordered with gold lace, upon which
was painted a skeleton, erect. In one hand it held a scythe and in the
other an hour-glass. At the right of the skeleton there was painted a
man with a cord around his neck, and to the left a man carrying his
head in his hands. Behind this gonfalon advanced two by two the
Brothers of the Consolation. This was a pious fraternity founded in
the chapel of Santa Maria dei Disciplini; this chapel was afterwards
changed into a church, which yielded to none other in Milan for its
beauty of architecture. To-day it is a common school. This fraternity,
which was transferred to San Giovanni _alle Case rotte_, had for its
one aim to succor the condemned and to prepare them for death. The
brothers advanced. They were attired in white habits, fitting tightly
around their figures, and their cowls were sewn around their heads.
Instead of a face, one saw a cross embroidered in red, and at the arms
of this cross tiny holes were made for the eyes to peer forth. On
their breasts they wore a black medal representing the death of
Christ, and at the foot of the cross was engraved the head of Saint
John the Baptist. With their long unbelted robes, the chains on their
wrists, they resembled nocturnal phantoms.

The last ones bore a coffin, and sang in lugubrious tones the doleful
'Miserere.' Chanting a service and carrying the bier of a person still
in the flesh! Breaking through the crowd, they arrived near the
scaffold and placed the bier upon the ground. Then they arranged
themselves in two cordons around the block, so that they could receive
the victim among them, and also to form a guard between the world and
her who was to leave it. Now a car came, moving slowly and drawn by
two oxen caparisoned in black. In this car was our poor Margherita.

In obedience to the curious sentiment which commands one to adorn
one's self for all occasions, even the melancholy ones, Margherita had
dressed herself in a rich robe of sombre hue. With great pains she had
arranged her black hair, which set off to advantage the delicate
pallor of the face revealing so much suffering. Upon her neck, which
had so often disputed whiteness with pearls, she now wore her rosary,
which seemed to outline the circle of the axe. In her hands she
clasped the crucifix attached to the chapelet, and from this she never
removed her eyes,--eyes which had always beamed with kindness and
sweetness, but which were now full of sorrow. They could only look
upon one object--the cross, the one hope of salvation.

By her side was seated Buonvicino, even paler, if possible, than she.
In his hand he held an image of the Crucified God who has suffered for
us. From time to time he spoke some consoling words to the young
victim,--a simple prayer such as our mothers have taught us in
infancy, and which come to us again in the most critical moments of
life:--"Savior, unto thee I yield my spirit. Maria, pray for me at the
hour of death. Depart, Christian soul, from this world, which is but a
place of exile, and return into that celestial country sanctified by
thy suffering, so that angels may bear thee to Paradise!"...

When Margherita appeared, every one exclaimed: "Oh, how beautiful she
is! She is so young!"

Then tears flowed. Many a silken handkerchief hid the eyes of fair
ladies, and many a hand, accustomed to a sword, tried to retard tears.

Every one looked towards Lucio to see if he would not wave a white
handkerchief--the signal of pardon.

Translated through the French by Esther Singleton, for the
'Library of the World's Best Literature.'

GIOSUE CARDUCCI

(1836-)

BY FRANK SEWALL

Rarely in the history of ancient or modern literature has a writer,
while living, been so generally recognized by his countrymen as their
national prophet as has the Italian poet and essayist Carducci. In
January, 1896, he completed his thirty-fifth year as Professor of
Belles-Lettres in the University of Bologna; and the solemn and
brilliant festivities with which the event was celebrated, extending
over three days and including congratulatory addresses from the king,
from the municipality, from the students and graduates, from foreign
universities, and from distinguished scholars at home and abroad,
testified to the remarkable hold this poet has gained on the
affections and esteem of the Italian people, and the deep impress
his writing has made on the literature of our time.

Born in northern Italy in the year 1836, and entering upon his
literary career at a time coincident with the downfall of foreign
power in Tuscany, the history of his authorship is a fair reflection
of the growth of the new Italy of to-day. In an autobiographical
sketch with which he prefaces his volume of 'Poesie' (1871) he depicts
with the utmost sincerity and frankness the transition through which
his own mind has passed, in breaking from the old traditions in which
he had been nursed at his mother's knee, and in meeting the dazzling
radiance of modern thought and feeling; the thrill of national liberty
and independence,--no longer a glory dreamed of, as by Alfieri, nor
sung in tones of despair, as by Leopardi, but as a living experience
of his own time. He felt the awakening to be at once a literary,
political, and religious one; and following his deep Hellenic
instincts, the religious rebound in him was rather to the paganism of
the ancient Latin forefathers than to the spiritual worship that had
come in with the infusion of foreign blood.

"This paganism," he says, "this cult of form, was naught else but the
love of that noble nature from which the solitary Semitic
estrangements had alienated hitherto the spirit of man in such bitter
opposition. My sentiment of opposition, at first feebly defined, thus
became confirmed conceit, reason, affirmation; the hymn to Apollo
became the hymn to Satan. Oh! the beautiful years from 1861 to 1865,
passed in peaceful solitude and quiet study, in the midst of a home
where the venerable mother, instead of fostering superstition, taught
us to read Alfieri. But as I read the codices of the fourteenth
century, the ideas of the Renaissance began to appear to me in the
gilded initial letters like the eyes of nymphs in the midst of
flowers, and between the lines of the spiritual _laude_ I detected the
Satanic strophe."

So long had Italy lived in passive dependence on the fame of her great
writers of the times of Augustus and of the Medici, and in the apathy
of a long-abandoned hope of political independence and achievement,
that it required a man of powerful instinct and genius to rouse the
people to a sense of their actual possession of a national life and of
a literature that is not alone of the past, and so to throw off both
the "livery of the slave and the mask of the courtesan." Such was the
mission of Carducci. As Howells in his 'Modern Italian Poets' remarks
of Leopardi:--"He seems to have been the poet of the national mood; he
was the final expression of that hopeless apathy in which Italy lay
bound for thirty years after the fall of Napoleon and his
governments." So it may be said of Carducci that in him speaks the
hope and joy of a nation waking to new life, and recalling her past
glories, no longer with shame but a purpose to prove herself worthy of
such a heritage.

A distinguished literary contemporary, Enrico Panzacchi, says of
Carducci:--

"I believe that I do not exaggerate the importance of Carducci when I
say that to him and to his persever

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