So she watch’d by the bed all night, and the lights were yellow and low,
And a cold blue blink shimmer’d up from the park that was sheeted in snow:
And the frost of the passing hour, when souls from the body divide,
The Sarsar-wind of the dawn, crept into the palace, and sigh’d.
And the child just turn’d her head towards Elizabeth there as she lay,
And her little hands came together in haste, as though she would pray;
And the words wrestled in her for speech that the fever-dry mouth cannot frame,
And the strife of the soul on the delicate brow was written in flame:
And Elizabeth call’d ‘O Father, why does she look at me so?
Will it soon be better for Anne? her face is all in a glow’:—
But with womanly speed and heed is the mother beside her, and slips
Her arm ’neath the failing head, and moistens the rose of the lips,
Pale and sweet as the wild rose of June, and whispers to pray
To the Father in heaven, ‘the one she likes best, my baby, to say’:
And the soul hover’d yet o’er the lips, as a dove when her pinions are spread,
And the light of the after-life came again in her eyes, and she said;
‘For my long prayer it is not time; for my short one I think I have breath;
Lighten mine eyes, O Lord, that I sleep not the sleep of death.’
—O! into life, fair child, as she pray’d, her innocence slept!
‘It is better for her,’ they said:—and knelt, and kiss’d her, and wept.
In her; Henrietta’s mother was by birth Mary de’ Medici; the great-grandmother of Charles was Mary of Guise.
‘With Charles I,’ says Ranke, ‘nothing was more seductive than secrecy. The contradictions in his conduct entangled him in embarrassments, in which his declarations, if always true in the sense he privately gave them, were only a hair’s-breadth removed from actual, and even from intentional, untruth.’—Whether traceable to descent, or to the evil influence of Buckingham and the intriguing atmosphere of the Spanish marriage-negotiations, this defect in political honesty is, unquestionably, the one serious blot on the character of Charles I.—Yet, whilst noting it, candid students will regretfully confess that the career of Elizabeth and her counsellors is defaced by shades of bad faith, darker and more numerous.
When the kingdom; See Clarendon’s description of England during this period, ‘enjoying the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people in any age for so long time together have been blessed with.’
Three golden heads; Mary, the second child of Charles and Henrietta, was born Nov. 4, 1631: Elizabeth, Dec. 28, 1635: Anne, Mar. 17, 1637. The last two were feeble from infancy. Consumption soon showed itself in Anne, and her short life, passed at Richmond, closed in November, 1640. For her last words, we are indebted to Fuller, who adds: ‘This done, the little lamb gave up the ghost.’
The affection and care of the royal parents is well attested. ‘Their arrival,’ when visiting the nursery, ‘was the signal of a general rejoicing.’
In the latter portion of this piece I have ventured, it will be seen, on an ideal treatment. The main facts, and the words of the dear child, are historical:—for the details I appeal to any mother who has suffered similar loss whether they could have been much otherwise.
Not seeing; See the Captive Child.
The frost; It is noticed that death, the Sarsar-wind of Southey’s Thalaba, often occurs at the turn between night and day, when the atmosphere is wont to be at the coldest.