Late in the afternoon of November 8, 1693, the rude cart which was to bear her to the guillotine received her. She was dressed in white; her hair fell like a mantle to her knees. The chilly air and her own courage brought back to her prison-blanched cheek the rosy hues of youth. She spoke words of divine patience to the crowd which surged around her on her way and reviled her. With a few low words she raised the courage of a terror-stricken old man who took with her the same last journey, and made him smile. As the hours wore into twilight, she passed the home of her youth, and perhaps longed to become a little child again and enter there and be at rest. At the foot of the scaffold she asked for pen and paper to bequeath to posterity the thoughts which crowded upon her; they were refused, and thus was one of the books of the sibyls lost. She bowed to the great statue of Liberty near by, exclaiming, "O Liberté! comme on t' a jouée!"[2] and gave her majestic form to the headsman to be bound upon the plank.
The knife fell, and the world darkened upon the death of the queenliest woman who ever lived and loved.--EX-GOVERNOR C.K. DAVIS, of Minnesota.
What though the triumph of thy fond forecasting
Lingers till earth is fading from thy sight?
Thy part with Him whose arms are everlasting,
Is not forsaken in a hopeless night.
Paul was begotten in the death of Stephen;
Fruitful through time shall be that precious blood:
No morning yet has ever worn to even
And missed the glory of its crimson flood.
There is a need of all the blood of martyrs,
Forevermore the eloquence of God;
And there is need of him who never barters
His patience in that desert way the Master trod.
What mean the strange, hard words, "through tribulation?"
O Man of sorrows, only Thou canst tell,
And such as in Thy life's humiliation,
Have oft been with Thee, ay, have known Thee well.
The failures of the world are God's successes,
Although their coming be akin to pain;
And frowns of Providence are but caresses,
Prophetic of the rest sought long in vain.
XXXVI.
CHEERFUL AND BRAVE.
THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON--SIR WALTER RALEIGH--XENOPHON-- CÆSAR--NELSON--HENRY OF NAVARRE--QUEEN ELIZABETH-- SYDNEY SMITH--ROBERT HALL--LATIMER--TOM HOOD.
Baron Muffling relates of the Duke of Wellington, that that great general remained at the Duchess of Richmond's ball till about three o'clock on the morning of the 16th of June, 1815, "showing himself very cheerful." The baron, who is a very good authority on the subject, having previously proved that every plan was laid in the duke's mind, and Quatre Bras and Waterloo fully detailed, we may comprehend the value of the sentence. It was the bold, trusting heart of the hero that made him cheerful. He showed himself cheerful, too, at Waterloo. He was never very jocose; but on that memorable 18th of June he showed a symptom of it. He rode along the line and cheered men by his look and his face, and they too cheered him. But, when the danger was over--when the 21,000 brave men of his own and the Prussian army lay stiffening in death--the duke, who was so cheerful in the midst of his danger, covered his face with his hands and wept. He asked for that friend, and he was slain; for this, and a bullet had pierced his heart. The men who had devoted themselves to death for their leader and their country had been blown to pieces, or pierced with lances, or hacked with sabers, and lay, like Ponsonby covered with thirteen wounds, upon the ground. Well might the duke weep, iron though he was. "There is nothing," he writes, "nothing in the world so dreadful as a battle lost, unless it be such a battle won. Nothing can compensate for the dreadful cruelty, carnage, and misery of the scene, save the reflection on the public good which may arise from it."
Forty years' peace succeeded the great battle. Forty years of prosperity, during which he himself went honored to his tomb, rewarded the constant brave look and tongue which answered his men, when he saw the whole side of a square blown in, with "Hard work, gentlemen! They are pounding away! We must see who can pound the longest." It is not too much to say that the constant cheerfulness of the Duke of Wellington was one great element of success in the greatest battle ever fought, one of the fifteen decisive battles in the world, great in the number engaged, greater in the slaughter, greatest in the results. But all commanders ought to be cheerful. Gloomy looks do not do in the army. A set of filibusters or pirates may wear looks and brows as black as the sticking-plasters boots that their representatives are dressed in at the minor theaters; but a soldier or a sailor should be, and as a rule is, the most cheerful of fellows, doing his duty in the trench or the storm, dying when the bullet comes, but living like a hero the while. Look, for instance, at the whole-hearted cheerfulness of Raleigh, when with his small English ships he cast himself against the navies of Spain; or at Xenophon, conducting back from an inhospitable and hostile country, and through unknown paths, his ten thousand Greeks; or Cæsar, riding up and down the banks of the Rubicon, sad enough belike when alone, but at the head of his men cheerful, joyous, well dressed, rather foppish, in fact, his face shining with good humor as with oil. Again, Nelson, in the worst of dangers, was as cheerful as the day. He had even a rough but quiet humor in him just as he carried his coxswain behind him to bundle the swords of the Spanish and French captains under his arm. He could clap his telescope to his blind eye, and say, "Gentlemen, I can not make out the signal," when the signal was adverse to his wishes, and then go in and win, in spite of recall. Fancy the dry laughs which many an old sea-dog has had over that cheerful incident. How the story lights up the dark page of history! Then there was Henry of Navarre, lion in war, winner of hearts, bravest of the brave, who rode down the ranks at Ivry when Papist and Protestant were face to face, when more than his own life and kingdom were at stake, and all the horrors of religious war were loosened and unbound, ready to ravage poor, unhappy France. That beaming, hopeful countenance won the battle, and is a parallel to the brave looks of Queen Elizabeth when she cheered her Englishmen at Tilbury.