[They sing together.
[424] The last days of two prisoners in the Luxembourg, Sillery and La Source, so affectingly described by Helen Maria Williams, in her Letters from France, gave rise to this little scene. These two victims had composed a simple hymn, which they sang together in a low and restrained voice every night.
[425] A French royalist officer, dying upon a field of battle, and hearing some one near him uttering the most plaintive lamentations, turned towards the sufferer, and thus addressed him:—“My friend, whoever you may be, remember that your God expired upon the cross—your king upon the scaffold—and he who now speaks to you has had his limbs shot from under him. Meet your fate as becomes a man.”
PRISONER’S EVENING SONG.
We see no more in thy pure skies,
How soft, O God! the sunset dies;
How every colour’d hill and wood
Seems melting in the golden flood:
Yet, by the precious memories won
From bright hours now for ever gone,