THE KING'S SENTINEL. the liberty of those of other masters, and especially the poor captives of war: and let him feed the needy, and house them, clothe and warm them, and give them bathing and beds." And Here was scope for the restless man. ere long there was not a miry way that was not paved, nor a brook that was not bridged, within some miles of his dwelling; and he made footpaths for wayfarers through his own and the convent woodland. And when King Canute went on his long pilgrimage to Rome, Merdhin prayed loyally for his safety every day. And when the king's public letter, addressed to the whole of his English subjects, was read in the churches, preparatory to his return, Merdhin committed to memory as much of it as follows, and solaced himself with repeating it at his toil: And now, therefore, be it known to you all that I have dedicated my life to God to govern my kingdoms with justice, and to observe the right in all things. If, in the time that is past, and in the violence and carelessness of youth, I have violated justice, it is my intention, by the help of God, to make full compensation. Therefore I beg and command those unto whom I have intrusted the government, as they wish to preserve my good-will, and save their own souls, to do no injustice either to rich or poor. Let those who are noble, and those who are not, equally obtain their rights, according to the laws, from which no deviation shall be allowed, either from fear of me, or through favour to the powerful, or for the purpose of supplying my treasury. I want no money raised by injustice." And when, three years after, Canute died, too soon for the peace of the kingdom, and too early for the accomplishment of many wise designs-for he was under forty at his deathHildelitha told to her children in winter evenings all the stories she had heard of good King Canute, and sang to them the ballads he had made: and Merdhin taught the elder ones to pray daily for his soul. WINTER SONG. They were parted then at last? Blew-to the meeting-gate? A glance, a trembling, a sigh, A gaze in the eyes, a kissWhy will it not go by? GEORGE MACDONALD THE KING'S SENTINEL. AN EASTERN LEGEND. [Richard Henry Stoddard, born in Hingham, Massachusetts, 1825. Although little known in this country, Mr. Stoddard has been long a favourite in America. He has written and edited numerous works of a poetical and biographical character; notably, The Castle by the Sea and other Poems; Adventures in Fairy-land (for children); The Loves and Heroines of the Poets: Madrigals from the old English Poets, &c. &c. R. W. Griswold, in his Poets of America, says of him: "His style is characterized by purity and grace of expression. He is a master of rhythmical melody, and his mode of treating a subject is sometimes exquisitely subtle."] Upon a time, unbidden, came a man A famous bowman, who of men alone I know to read the riddle of the stars. "Try me.' As thrice the monarch claps his hands, Now when a moon of nights had ta'en its flight, Amid the darkness of a summer night, The king awoke, alarmed, with fluttering breath, Like one who struggles in the toils of death, And wandered to his lattice, which stood wide, Whence, down below him in the court, he spied A shadowy figure, with a threatening spear. "What man art thou?-if man-and wherefore here?" "Your sentinel, and servant, O my lord!" "Hearken!" They did. And now a voice was heard, But whether from the desert far away, Or from the neighbour-garden, who could say? So far it was, yet near, so loud, yet low; Nor knew that the king kept him still in sight- Of some great king, so much of joy and woe No woman, born of woman, half so fair! The spirit of your lord, whose end is nigh, Except some friend-what friend?--for him will die." "Can I?" But she: "Tis written you must live." "What then-my life rejected-can I give?" "You have a son," she whispered in his ear, Feeling her way, it seemed, in hope and fear, Lest what she would demand should be denied. He pressed a sudden hand against his side Where his heart ached, but spake not. son, "Fetch your And I remain; refuse, and I am gone And while she lifted his dead weight, and wound Meanwhile the sentinel down the royal park For the low branches were as hands thrust out— Since they both clutched and pushed, he could not say; Nor, so irregular his heart's wild beat, Whether he ran, or dragged his lagging feet! He wept a little for his own sad sake, Not worth your hearing. In the park I found For this dead child of yours, who met my doom, MY FIRST FOLLY. L'imagination grossit souvent les plus petits objets par une estimation fantastique jusqu'à remplir notre âme."-PENSÉES DE PASCAL. "I have spent all my golden time OLD BALLAD. "Do you take trifle?" said Lady Olivia to my poor friend Halloran. "No, ma'am, I am reading philosophy," said Halloran, waking from a fit of abstraction, with about as much consciousness and perception as exists in a petrified oyster, or an alderman dying of a surfeit. -Halloran is a fool. A trifle is the one good thing, the sole and surpassing enjoyment. He only is happy who can fix his thoughts, and his hopes, and his feelings, and his affections, upon those fickle and fading pleasures which are tenderly cher ished and easily forgotten, alike acute in their excitement and brief in their regret. Trifles constitute my summum bonum. Sages may crush them with the heavy train of argument and syllogism; school-boys may assail them with the light artillery of essay and of theme; members of parliament may loathe, doctors of divinity may contemn:-bag-wigs and bigwigs, blue-devils and blue-stockings, sophistry and sermons, reasonings and wrinkles, Solon, Thales, Newton's Principia, Mr. Walker's Eidouranion, the King's Bench, the bench of bishops all these are serious antagonists; very serious! but I care not; I defy them; I dote upon trifles; and my name is Vyvyan Joyeuse, and my motto is "Vive la Bagatelle." There are many persons who, while they have a tolerable taste for the frivolous, yet profess remorse and penitence for their indulgence of it; and continually court and embrace new day-dreams, while they shrink from the retrospect of those which have already faded. Peace be to their everlasting laments and their ever-broken resolutions. Your true trifler, meaning your humble servant, is a being of a very different order. The luxury which I renew in the recollection of the past is equal to that which I feel in the enjoyment of the present, or create in the anticipation of the future. I love to count and recount every treasure I have flung away, every bubble I have broken; I love to dream again the dreams of my boyhood, and to see the visions of departed pleasures flitting like Ossian's ghosts around me, "with stars dim twinkling through their forms." I look back with delight to a youth which has been idled away, to tastes which have been perverted, to talents which have been misemployed; and while in imagination I wander back through the haunts of my old idlesse, for all the learning of a Greek professor, for all the morality of Sir John Sewel, I would not lose one single point of that which has been ridiculous and grotesque, nor one single tint of that which has been beautiful and beloved. Moralists and misanthropists, maidens with starched morals and matrons with starched frills, ancient adorers of bohea and scandal, venerable votaries of whispering and of whist, learned professors of the compassionate sneer and the innocent innuendo, eternal pillars of gravity and good order, of stupidity and decorum, come not near me with your spare and spectacled features, your candid and considerate criticism. In you I have no hope, in me you have no interest. I am to speak of stories you will not believe, of beings you cannot love; of foibles for which you have no compassion, of feelings in which you have no share. Fortunate and unfortunate couples, belles in silks and beaux in sentimentals, ye who have wept and sighed, ye who have been wept for and sighed for, victims of vapours and coiners of vows, makers and marrers of intrigue, readers and writers of songs, come to me with your attention and your salts, your sympathy and your cambric; your griefs, your raptures, your anxieties, all have been mine; I know your blushing and your paleness, your selfdeceiving and your self-tormenting, "so com'è inconstanta e vaga E qual è 'l mel temprato con l'assenzio." 1 All these things are so beautiful in Italian! but I need not have borrowed a syllable from Petrarch, for shapes of shadowy beauty, smiles of cherished loveliness, glances of reviving lustre, are coming in the mist of memory around me. I am writing "an ower true tale!" I never fell seriously in love till I was seventeen. Long before that period I had learned to talk nonsense and tell lies, and had established the important points that a delicate figure is equivalent to a thousand pounds, a pretty mouth better than the Bank of England, and a pair of bright eyes worth all Mexico. But at seventeen a more intricate branch of study awaited me. I was lounging away my June at a pretty village in Kent, with little occupation beyond my own meditations, and no company but my horse and dogs. My sisters were both in the south of France, and my uncle, at whose seat I had pitched my camp, was attending to the interests of his constituents and the wishes of his patron in parliament. I began, after the lapse of a week, to be immensely bored; I felt a considerable dislike of an agricultural life, and an incipient inclination for laudanum. I took to playing backgammon with the rector. He was more than a match for me, and used to grow most unclerically hot when the dice, as was their duty, befriended the weaker side. At last, at the conclusion of a very long hit, which had kept Mrs. Penn's tea waiting full an hour, my worthy and wigged friend flung deuce-ace three times in succession, put the board in the fire, overturned Mrs. Penn's best china, and hurried to his study to compose a sermon on patience. Then I took up reading. My uncle had a delightful library where a reasonable man might have lived and died. But I confess I never could endure a long hour of lonely reading. It is a very pretty thing to take down a volume of Tasso or Racine, and study accent and cadence 1 The following is a translation of these lines:- for the benefit of half-a-dozen listening belles, all dividing their attention between the work and the work-basket, their feelings and their flounces, their tears and their trimmings, with becoming and laudable perseverance. It is a far prettier thing to read Petrarch or Rousseau with a single companion, in some sheltered spot so full of passion and of beauty, that you may sit whole days in its fragrance and dream of Laura and Julie. If these are out of the way, it is endurable to be tied down to the moth-eaten marvels of antiquity, poring to-day that you may pore again to-morrow, and labouring for the nine-days' wonder of some temporary distinction, with an ambition which is almost frenzy, and an emulation which speaks the language of animosity. But to sit down to a novel or a philosopher, with no companion to participate in the enjoyment, and no object to reward the toil, this indeed-oh! I never could endure a long hour of lonely reading; and so I deserted Sir Roger's library, and left his Marmontel and his Aristotle to the slumbers from which I had unthinkingly awakened them. At last I was roused from a state of most Persian torpor by a note from an old lady, whose hall, for so an indifferent country-house was by courtesy denominated, stood at the distance of a few miles. She was about to give a ball. Such a thing had not been seen for ten years within ten miles of us. From the sensation produced by the intimation you might have deemed the world at an end. Prayers and entreaties were offered up to all the guardians and all the milliners; and the old gentlemen rose in a passion and the old lace rose in price. Everything was everywhere in a flurry; kitchen, and parlour, and boudoir, and garret-Babel all! Ackermann's Fashionable Repository, the Ladies' Magazine, the New Pocket-book, all these, and all other publications whose frontispieces presented the "fashions for 1817," personified in a thin lady with kid gloves and a formidable obliquity of vision, were in earnest and immediate requisition. Needles and pins were flying right and left; dinner was ill-dressed that dancers might be well-dressed; mutton was marred that misses might be married. There was not a school-boy who did not cut Homer and capers; nor a boarding-school beauty who did not try on a score of dancing-shoes, and talk for a fortnight of Angiolini. Every occupation was laid down, every carpet was taken up; every combination of hands-a-cross and down the middle was committed most And lovers' ways—their sighs, their songs, I know, laudably to memory; and nothing was talked, Their broken words and sudden silences I know the short-lived smile, the long laments The taste of honey when 'tis mixed with gall." nothing was meditated, nothing was dreamed, but love and romance, fiddles and flirtation, warm negus and handsome partners, dyed | in,-never saw such a-there, Vyvyan, look feathers and chalked floors. In all the pride and condescension of an inmate of Grosvenor Square I looked upon Lady Motley's "At Home." "Yes," I said, flinging away the card with a tragedy twist of the fingers,-"yes, I will be there. For one evening I will encounter the tedium and the taste of a village ball. For one evening I will doom myself to figures that are out of date and fiddles that are out of tune; dowagers who make embroidery by wholesale, and demoiselles who make conquests by profession: for one evening I will endure the inquiries about Almack's and St. Paul's, the tales of the weddings that have been and the weddings that are to be, the round of curtsies in the ball-room and the round of beef at the supper-table: for one evening I will not complain of the everlasting hostess and the everlasting boulanger, of the double duty and the double bass, of the great heiress and the great plum-pudding: "Come one, come all, Come dance in Sir Roger's great hall." And thus, by dint of civility, indolence, quotation, and antithesis, I bent up each corporal agent to the terrible feat, and "would have the honour of waiting upon her ladyship," -in due form. there! I will introduce you." And so saying my companion half limped, half danced with me up to Miss Amelia Mesnil and presented me in due form. When I look back to any particular scene of my existence, I can never keep the stage clear of second-rate characters. I never think of Mr. Kean's Othello without an intrusive reflection upon the subject of Mr. Cooper's Cassio; I never call to mind a gorgeous scattering forth of roses from Mr. Canning, without a painful idea of some contemporary effusion of poppies from Mr. Hume. And thus, beautiful Margaret, it is in vain that I endeavour to separate your fascination from the group which was collected around you. Perhaps that dominion, which at this moment I feel almost revived, recurs more vividly to my imagination when the forms and figures of all by whom it was contested are associated in its renewal. First comes Amelia the magnificent, the acknowledged belle of the country, very stiff and very dumb in her unheeded and uncontested supremacy; and next, the most black-browed of fox-hunters, Augusta, enumerating the names of her father's stud, and dancing as if she imitated them; and then the most accomplished Jane, vowing that for the last month she had endured immense ennui, that she thinks Lady Olivia prodigiously fade, that her cousin Sophy is quite brillante to-night, and that Mr. Peters plays the violin à merveille. "I am bored, my dear Villars-positively bored! the light is bad and the music abominable; there is no spring in the boards and less in the conversation; it is a lovely moonlight night, and there is nothing worth looking at in the room." I shook hands with my friend, bowed to three or four people, and was moving off. As I passed to the door I met two ladies in con I went: turned my uncle's one-horse chaise into the long old avenue about an hour after | the time specified, and perceived by the lights flashing from all the windows and the crash of chairs and carriages returning from the door, that the room was most punctually full and the performers most pastorally impatient. The first face I encountered on my entrance was that of my old friend Villars; I was delighted to meet him, and expressed my astonishment at finding him in a situation for which his inclination, one would have supposed, was so little adapted. "By Mercury," he exclaimed, "I am meta-versation; "Don't you dance any more, Marmorphosed, fairly metamorphosed, my good Vyvyan; I have been detained here three months by a fall from Sir Peter, and have amused myself most indefatigably by humming tunes and reading newspapers, winding silk and guessing conundrums. I have made myself the admiration, the adoration, the very worship of all the coteries in the place; am reckoned very clever at cross-purposes, and very apt at 'what's my thought like!' The 'squires have discovered I can carve, and the matrons hold me indispensable at loo. Come! I am of little service to-night, but my popularity may be of use to you; you don't know a soul!-I thought so-read it in your face the moment you came garet?" said one. "Oh no," replied the other, "I am bored, my dear Lousia-positively bored; the light is bad and the music abominable; there is no spring in the boards and less in the conversation; it is a lovely moonlight night, and there is nothing worth looking at in the room.' I never was distanced in a jest. I put on the look of a ten years' acquaintance and commenced parley. "Surely you are not going away yet; you have not danced with me, Margaret; it is impossible you can be so cruel!" The lady behaved with wonderful intrepidity. "She would allow me the honour,-but I was very late;-really I had not deserved it," and so we stood up together. |