There, sad spectatress of her country's woe! But short that contemplation—sad and short Where friendly swords were drawn and banners flew ; And Albert, Albert falls! the dear old father bleeds! And tranced in giddy horror, Gertrude swooned; These wounds; yet thee to leave is death, is death indeed! Clasp me a little longer on the brink Of fate! while I can feel thy dear caress; And when this heart hath ceased to beat-oh! think, And let it mitigate thy woe's excess, That thou hast been to me all tenderness, And friend to more than human friendship just. And by the hopes of an immortal trust, God shall assuage thy pangs-when I am laid in dust!' Hushed were his Gertrude's lips! but still their bland And beautiful expression seemed to melt With love that could not die! and still his hand He heard some friendly words, but knew not what they For now, to mourn their judge and child, arrives Then mournfully the parting bugle bid Its farewell o'er the grave of worth and truth; He watched, beneath its folds, each burst that came And I could weep,' the Oneyda chief His descant wildly thus begun; The death-song of my father's son, Or bow this head in woe! For, by my wrongs, and by my wrath, That fires yon heaven with storms of death, And we shall share, my Christian boy, 'But thee, my flower, whose breath was given By milder genii o'er the deep, The spirits of the white man's heaven Nor will the Christian host, Nor will thy father's spirit grieve, To see thee, on the battle's eve, But when the bolt of death is hurled, Seek we thy once-loved home? The hand is gone that cropt its flowers; Its echoes and its empty tread 'Or shall we cross yon mountains blue, A thousand warriors drew the shaft? Ah! there, in desolation cold, The desert serpent dwells alone, Where grass o'ergrows each mouldering bone, And stones themselves to ruin grown, Like me, are death-like old. Then seek we not their camp; for there The silence dwells of my despair! 'But hark, the trump! to-morrow thou (From Gertrude of Wyoming.) Ye Mariners of England. Ye mariners of England! 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 spirits of your fathers Shall start from every wave! For the deck it was their field of fame, Her march is o'er the mountain-waves, With thunders from her native oak, As they roar on the shore, When the stormy winds do blow; Till danger's troubled night depart, When the storm has ceased to blow; And the storm has ceased to blow ! When the poem was first published in the Naval Chronicle for 1801, the line about Blake and Nelson read 'Where Granvill (boast of freedom) fell;' but after Trafalgar the Georgian hero was substituted for the Elizabethan, Tennyson's Sir Richard Grenville; and Blake the Cromwellian was added-though Blake did not precisely fall,' but died of scorbutic fever on board his ship as it entered Plymouth Sound. The Battle of the Baltic. Of Nelson and the North, Sing the glorious day's renown, All the might of Denmark's crown, And her arms along the deep proudly shone ; By each gun the lighted brand, In a bold determined hand, And the Prince of all the land Led them on. Like leviathans afloat, Lay their bulwarks on the brine; While the sign of battle flew On the lofty British line: It was ten of April morn by the chime : As they drifted on their path, There was silence deep as death; And the boldest held his breath But the might of England flushed To anticipate the scene; And her van the fleeter rushed O'er the deadly space between. 'Hearts of oak!' our captains cried; when each gun From its adamantine lips Spread a death-shade round the ships, Like the hurricane eclipse Of the sun. Again! again! again! To our cheering sent us back; As they strike the shattered sail; Out spoke the victor then, As he hailed them o'er the wave: 'Ye are brothers! ye are men! And we conquer but to save; So peace instead of death let us bring; With the crews, at England's feet, To our king.' Then Denmark blessed our chief, As death withdrew his shades from the day. O'er a wide and woful sight, Where the fires of funeral light Died away. Now joy, Old England, raise! For the tidings of thy might, Brave hearts! to Britain's pride Soft sigh the winds of heaven o'er their grave! And the mermaid's song condoles, Of the brave! Captain Riou was praised by Lord Nelson as the gallant and the good. The first draft of this poem, sent to Scott in 1805, consisted of thirty stanzas-all published in Beattie's Life of Campbell. The piece was greatly improved by condensation, but the excision of these verses on English sailors was clearly a loss: Not such a mind possessed England's tar; "Twas the love of noble game All hands and eyes on watch By their motion light as wings, Hohenlinden. On Linden, when the sun was low, All bloodless lay the untrodden snow, But Linden saw another sight, When the drum beat at dead of night, Commanding fires of death to light By torch and trumpet fast arrayed, Then shook the hills with thunder riven, But redder yet that light shall glow 'Tis morn, but scarce yon level sun The combat deepens. On, ye brave, Few, few shall part where many meet ! From 'The Last Man.' All worldly shapes shall melt in gloom- Before this mortal shall assume I saw a vision in my sleep, That gave my spirit strength to sweep I saw the last of human mould The sun's eye had a sickly glare, Some had expired in fight—the brands In plague and famine some: Earth's cities had no sound nor tread; And ships were drifting with the dead To shores where all was dumb! Yet, prophet-like, that lone one stood Saying: 'We are twins in death, proud sun; 'Tis Mercy bids thee go. For thou, ten thousand thousand years, That shall no longer flow. . . . 'This spirit shall return to Him From 'O'Connor's Child.' But woe to them that wrapt in blood Still as I clasp my burning brain, It rises o'er and o'er again, The bloody feud-the fatal night, Ah, brothers! what did it avail, Upon a hundred mountains glow'd? At bleating of the wild watch-fold Thus sang my love-‘Oh, come with me: And I, beside the lake of swans, Shall hunt for thee the fallow-deer; And play my clarshech by thy side. Our nimble stag-hounds track'd the way, The light of Connocht Moran's eyes. And fast and far, before the star Of day-spring, rush'd we through the glade, Sweet was to us the hermitage Of this unplough'd, untroddden shore; When all was hush'd, at even tide, And every hand that dealt the blow- Dragg'd to their hated mansion back, Thrice in the east a war-drum beat, The standard of O'Connor's sway And go! (I cried) the combat seek, For sooner guilt the ordeal-brand I swear I never could have spoke From 'Ode to the Memory of Burns.' Farewell, high chief of Scottish song! Farewell! and ne'er may Envy dare To bless the spot that holds thy dust. The authorities for Campbell's biography are his Life and Letters by W. Beattie (1840), and Cyrus Redding's Literary Reminiscences of him (1859). There is also a monograph on him by Cuthbert Hadden in the Famous Scots' series (1900; unsympathetic). The best popular edition of his poems is the Aldine (1875; new ed. 1890; based on that of his nephew, the Rev. W. A. Hill, 1860), with a Memoir by William Allingham the poet. Lady Dacre (1768-1854), one of the most accomplished women of her time, was a daughter of Admiral Ogle, and was married first to Mr Wilmot, an officer in the Guards, and in 1819 to the twenty-first Lord Dacre. She wrote poems and four dramas, of which Ina, on an AngloSaxon plot, was produced at Drury Lane by Sheridan; and her translations from Petrarch were published with Ugo Foscolo's Essays on Petrarch (1823). A separate volume of her Translations from the Italian was privately printed in 1836. Her one daughter, the wife of Mr Sullivan, a Hertfordshire clergyman, wrote The Recollections of a Chaperon and Tales of the Peerage and Peasantry, both of which were edited by Lady Dacre. Lady Charlotte Bury (1775-1861) wrote nearly a score of books (most of them anonymously), including several fashionable novelsFlirtation, Separation, A Marriage in High Life, The Divorced, Family Records, Love, some poems, two books of devotion, and, as was then believed and still seems probable, the Diary illustrative of the Times of George IV., a scandalous chronicle, published in 1838. Born Lady Charlotte Campbell-a daughter of the Duke of Argyll by his duchess, 'the beautiful Miss Gunning,' widow of the Duke of Hamilton-she had for her first husband Colonel John Campbell. During her widowhood and before her marriage to the Rev. E. J. Bury, while holding an appointment in the household of the Princess of Wales, she seems to have kept this Diary, in which she recorded the foibles and failings of the unfortunate princess and other members of the court. The work was strongly condemned by the leading critical journals, and was received generally with much professed disapprobation, but nevertheless ran swiftly through several editions. Mary Brunton (1778-1818), novelist, was born in the small, bare, and wind-swept island of Burray in the Orkneys, the daughter of Colonel Balfour of Elwick and a niece of Lord Ligonier. Mary was carefully educated by her mother, and at Edinburgh thoroughly acquired French and Italian; but while she was only sixteen her mother died, and for four years the cares and duties of the household devolved on her. Then she was married to the minister of Bolton in Haddingtonshire; and when in 1803 Mr Brunton was called to one of the churches in Edinburgh, she had opportunity of meeting cultivated society. 'Till I began Self-control,' she says in one of her letters, 'I had never in my life written anything but a letter or a recipe, excepting a few hundreds of vile rhymes, from which I desisted by the time I had gained the wisdom of fifteen years; therefore I was so ignorant of the art on which I was entering, that I formed scarcely any plan for my tale. I merely intended to show the power of the religious principle in bestowing self-command, and to bear testimony against a maxim as immoral as indelicate, that a reformed rake makes the best husband.' Of Self-control, published anonymously in 1811, the first edition was sold in a month, and a second and third were called for. In 1814 Discipline was also well received. She began a third work, Emmeline, but did not live to finish it. Next year her husband published (1819) the un finished tale with a memoir. In Self-control the authoress showed acute observation, and attained individuality in her portraits; but the plot is very unskilfully managed, and the style at times conventional and stilted. Hargrave is obviously based on Lovelace, and Laura is the Clarissa of the tale. Christian Isobel Johnstone (1781-1857) published anonymously Clan Albin (1815), a tale written before the appearance of Waverley, and like Waverley aiming to cast a romantic glow over Highland character and scenery. A second novel, Elizabeth de Bruce, was published in 1827 by Mrs Johnstone, who wrote some interesting tales for children—The Diversions of Hollycot, The Knights of the Round Table, &c.-and was an extensive contributor to the periodical literature of the day. She was for some years editor of Taifs Magazine. But the most notable and successful of her publications was the unromantic Cook and Housewife's Manual, by Mrs Margaret Dods, familiarly known as 'Meg Dods's Cookery' (the pseudonym being taken from St Ronan's Well, which went through ten editions between 1826 and 1854. Born in Fife, she was the wife of a Dunfermline schoolmaster, who became an editor and publisher, latterly in Edinburgh. Jane Porter (1776–1850) and Anna Maria Porter (1780-1832) were daughters of an Irish army-surgeon, who died in 1779, leaving a widow and five children with but a small patrimony for their support. Mrs Porter removed from Durham to Edinburgh while Anna Maria was still in her nurse-maid's arms, and there the two girls and their brother, Sir Robert Ker Porter, received the rudiments of their education. Sir Walter Scott, when a student at college, was intimate with the family, and as to Jane we are told 'he was very fond of either teasing the little female student when very gravely engaged with her book, or more often fondling her on his knees, and telling her stories of witches and warlocks, till both forgot their former playful merriment in the marvellous interest of the tale.' Chiefly with a view to the education of her children, Mrs Porter left Edinburgh in 1790 for London, settling finally at Esher in Surrey. Anna Maria became an authoress at the age of twelve, with Artless Tales (2 vols. 1793-95). In 1797 she published Walsh Colville, and in 1798 a three-volume novel, Octavia. A numerous series of works of fiction followed-The Lake of Killarney (1804), A Sailor's Friendship and a Soldier's Love (1805), The Hungarian Brothers (1807), Don Sebastian, or the House of Braganza (1809), Ballad Romances and other Poems (1811), The Recluse of Norway (1814), Honor O'Hara (1826), &c. Altogether, Miss Porter's works amount to about fifty volumes. She died at Bristol while on a visit to her brother, Dr Porter of that city, in 1832. The most popular and perhaps the best of Anna Maria Porter's novels is her Don Sebastian. In all of them she |