8 Stout Skippon hath a wound; the centre hath given ground; 9 Their heads all stooping low, their points all in a row, 10 Fast, fast, the gallants ride, in some safe nook to hide 11 Ho! comrades, scour the plain; and, ere ye strip the slain, Then shake from sleeves and pockets their broad pieces and lockets, The tokens of the wanton, the plunder of the poor. 12 Fools! your doublets shone with gold, and your hearts were gay and bold, When you kissed your lily hands to your lēmans to-day, And to-morrow shall the fox, from her chambers in the rocks, Lead forth her tawny cubs to howl above the prey. 13 Where be your tongues that, late, mocked at heaven and hell and fate, And the fingers that once were so busy with your blades, Your perfumed satin clothes, your catches and your oaths, Your stage plays, and your sonnets, your diamonds and your spades? 14 Down, down, for ever down, with the mitre and the crown, 15 And She of the Seven Hills shall mourn her children's ills, NOTES. Verse 1 is addressed to the Puritan army by Puritans of the South, on its return from Naseby. The long Scripture name assumed by the Puritan writer, as the custom of his party was, is taken from Psalm cxlix. 8. The North. Leicester had recently been taken by storm by the King, and Fairfax, the Parliamentary general, had raised the siege of Oxford, to march north against him. On the Puritan army showing itself, Charles came south, five or six miles, to Naseby, an upland village among the moors, on the west edge of Northampton, and there was utterly defeated. Verse 2 is the answer of the soldiery. The blood of the Royalists is spoken of as the red of grapes trodden in the wine-press. See Isaiah Ixiii. 1–3. The Royalists scorned the Puritans as mechanics, and the like. They themselves comprised nearly all the nobility and gentry. Who sate in the high placeswere the court party, and held all the high offices. The saints of God, the Puritans. Verse 3. June, See prefatory note. Man of Blood. The King was called so, as the assumed cause of the war. Long essenced hair, the long perfumed locks of the Cavaliers or Royalists. The Puritans cut their hair short, whence their name of Roundheads. Astley, Sir Jacob Astley, one of the King's generals. Sir Marmaduke, Sir M. Langdale, a Royalist general, who was taken prisoner afterwards, but escaped. Rupert of the Rhine, son of King Charles's sister and of Frederic, Elector of the Palatinate, a district on both sides of the Rhine, from Mainz to Mannheim, and from Frankfort to Spires. Palatine means "possessing royal privileges." He fought for the King, at the head of the royal cavalry. Born, 1619; died, 1682. He was 26 at the battle of Naseby. Verse 4. The General, Sir Thomas Fairfax. Born, 1611; died, 1671. Thirtyfour years old at Naseby. Verse 5. The battle began by a charge of Rupert's cavalry, the right of the King's army, on the left of the Puritan army, which was ridden down and scattered. But Rupert lost the advantage by stopping to plunder the baggage. Verse 6. Alsatia, the part of London between Fleet Street and the Thames, then the haunt of bravoes and desperadoes. Whitehall, the palace, before which Charles was afterwards beheaded. Burned in 1699. The Banqueting-house, by Inigo Jones (born, 1573; died, 1653) alone remains. Verse 7. See notes on verse 5. Verse 8. Skippon, a major-general of the Puritans. The left being defeated, the centre wavered for the moment, when Cromwell, with his Ironsides (cavalry), charged the Royalist left, scattered it, put Rupert's horse to flight, and routed the King's army. Cromwell was born 1599; died, 1658: forty-six years of age at this time. Verse 9. The dykes, sea-walls of earth, to keep out the sea: universal in Holland, and common on our cast coast. Accurst, an expression of Puritan bitterness towards their opponents. Cuirassiers. The Ironsides wore coats made of buffalo leather, whence the word cuirassier, a leather-coated soldier. It is now, however, used of troops with steel breast and back-plates. Verse 10. Rot on Temple Bar, the gate of London at the west end of Flect Street. The heads of political prisoners were fixed on it as late as 1745. He, King Charles. To look on torture. The King was charged with torturing Puritan prisoners. An allusion also to the bloody sentences of the Court of the Star Chamber, and of the Council Table, both of doubtful legality. Verse 12, lemans, sweethearts. Verse 14. Belial, the devil-as foul, licentious, abandoned. Here used, most unjustly, of the King, who was a man of pure life. Mammon of the Pope. Mammon, the Syrian God of Riches; the symbol of sordid, grovelling love of money; used of the Pope, to whom the Puritans were bitterly opposed. Oxford, the King's head-quarters during use. He Durham, then the richest see in Eng- Jesuit, member of the Society of Jesus Founded by Ignatius Loyola (born, 1491; Verse 15. She of the Seven Hills, Houses, the Houses of Parliament, THE PENGUINS AT INACESSIBLE ISLAND.1 1. WE steamed slowly over during the night, and early next morning anchored off the northern side of Inaccessible Island; a magnificent wall of black cliff, splashed green with moss and ferns, rising sheer 1,300 feet above the sea, and beneath it a strip of stony beach, about a mile in length, stretching between two bold bluffs. At the foot of the cliffs we saw a hut, and soon afterwards two Germans. Very good fellows they proved to be, talking capital English, and delighted to see us; we gave them a passage to the Cape of Good Hope. 2. We landed on the beach soon afterwards, a smooth sea and a fine day making the landing easy. All round these islands a field of kelp is rooted in from fifteen to twenty-six fathoms, which subdues the surf wonderfully-indeed, without this natural breakwater landing would be nearly impossible. From the ship we had seen penguins2 on the beach, so we at once" made" for them, and found that they were the "crested gorfew," a small species with a crest on the top of the head, the outside feathers of which, above the occiput, are yellow; back and head slate colour, throat and breast white, short black tail, pink feet, red and very sharp bills-as we found to our cost-very small flappers, red eyes, with small black pupils, which give them a most peculiar and vicious expression. 3. Between the foot of the cliff and the stony beach was an earth bank covered with long tussock grass, among which they had their nests; landing at one or two spots only from the sea, they had regular roads into the rookeries. As you come up to a large group of a hundred or more squatted on the beach, they all stare at you; then, thinking there is something wrong, all turn together as one, and go hop-hop-hopping over the large stones, their yellow crests flopping up and down, at every hop bobbing their old heads, hunching their old backs, and wobbling their flappers; away they go, hop-hopping rapidly off, stopping after every jump to recover and make sure of their equilibrium, and altogether ludicrously like a crowd of hunch-backed old men with their feet tied. 4. But the water is the element to see them at home in; when first we landed we were very much puzzled by seeing a large, oddlooking fish leaping out of the water in shoals, and in this manner proceeding rapidly along. At last somebody said, "They're penguins!" and so they were-an odd sight truly! Among the stems of the tall tussock grass they were sitting about in thousands on their nests, consisting of a layer of grass. As you may imagine, it was not pleasant walking in the rookery, dreadfully dirty and horrible smells, to say nothing of the fierce digs we got in our legs, and the fiendish noise-something between the last notes of a donkey's bray and a deep-voiced sheep-a perfect roar, which is kept up night and day, and plainly audible from the ship, sounding on the still night air like the roar of a heavy surf. 5. They never had more than two eggs, sometimes only one, larger than a Dorking's, coloured dirty white, with brown stains. The young were black, all just out of the egg, horrible, naked, egg-shaped, palpitating things. Many of the eggs were cracked by the young, inside, who were poking their bills out. There were no signs of fish in the rookery, and I don't know how the young are fed; perhaps the parents disgorge choice morsels; but then one would expect to see some signs round the nests. Motherly old things they are, very fierce, when sitting on or among their nests, glaring up with wide-open beak, howling wildly, and if you come near enough, biting and pecking very hard indeed. They take any number of young under their capacious breasts, and if you take an old one off her nest, and consign her young to another, this last will at once take charge of them, pushing them underneath her with her beak, although she has already two of her own. 6. When their young have arrived at a certain age, they take them to sea; and some of us saw, while fishing from a boat, a penguin bob up close by, which had two wee black things supported on her flappers. How the young can manage to hold on when the flappers are working I cannot imagine, as penguins never use their feet when diving; besides which there are sharks, and the Germans tell us that they have seen penguins with their feet bitten off. An endless stream of these penguins is perpetually coming and going, some to sea, others to their nests, others resting midway on the shore; and it is the most laughable thing in the world to see them coming down a steep bit from the top of the bank to the beach, a feat they perform either by waddling carefully sideways, or by straightforward jumps, looking as if they said after every jump, "So far good! Now another!" as, plop, they landed, after every jump, looking human to the last degree, with their pink feet. THANATOPSIS.-WILLIAM CULLEN Bryant. MR. BRYANT was born in Massachusetts so long ago as 1794, and died, at the age of 84, in June, 1878. He had been editor of a New York paper since 1826. His first published poem was written when he was only thirteen years old. He is the greatest poet America has yet produced. The following piece, published in 1821, is not inferior in its best passages to the finest parts of our greatest poets. There is nothing in Spenser or Byron to surpass it. To him who in the love of nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language; for his gayer hours F |