‘The still, sad music of humanity’—
‘The river glideth at his own sweet will’—
‘Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods’—
and a thousand others, which we must some time (and I hope not a very distant one) talk over together. Many of these lines quite haunt me: and I have a strange feeling, as if I must have known them in my childhood; they come over me so like old melodies. I can hardly speak of favourites among so many things that delight me; but I think ‘The Narrow Glen,’ the ‘Lines on Corra Linn,’ the ‘Song for the Feast of Brougham Castle,’ ‘Yarrow Visited,’ and ‘The Cuckoo,’ are among those which take hold of imagination the soonest, and recur most frequently to memory.
“I know not how I can have so long omitted to mention the Ecclesiastical Sketches, which I have read, and do constantly read, with deep interest. Their beauty grows upon you, and develops as you study it, like that of the old pictures by the Italian masters.”]
A MONARCH’S DEATH-BED.
[The Emperor Albert of Hapsburg, who was assassinated by his nephew, afterwards called John the Parricide, was left to die by the wayside, and only supported in his last moments by a female peasant, who happened to be passing.]
A monarch on his deathbed lay—
Did censers waft perfume,