Heavy and solemn,
A cloudy column,
Thro' the green plain they marching came!
Measureless spread, like a table dread,
For the wild grim dice of the iron game.
The looks are bent on the shaking ground,
And the heart beats loud with a knelling sound;
Swift by the breasts that must bear the brunt,
Gallops the Major along the front—
"Halt!"
And fetter'd they stand at the stark command,
And the warriors, silent, halt!

Proud in the blush of morning glowing,
What on the hill-top shines in flowing?
"See you the Foeman's banners waving?"
"We see the Foeman's banners waving!"
Now, God be with you, woman and child,
Lustily hark to the music wild—
The mighty trump and the mellow fife,
Nerving the limbs to a stouter life;
Thrilling they sound with their glorious tone,
Thrilling they go, through the marrow and bone.
Brothers, God grant when this life is o'er,
In the life to come that we meet once more!
See the smoke how the lightning is cleaving asunder!
Hark the guns, peal on peal, how they boom in their thunder!
From host to host, with kindling sound,
The shouting signal circles round,
Ay, shout it forth to life or death—
Freer already breathes the breath!
The war is waging, slaughter raging,
And heavy through the reeking pall,
The iron Death-dice fall!
Nearer they close—foes upon foes
"Ready!"—From square to square it goes,
Down on the knee they sank,
And the fire comes sharp from the foremost rank.
Many a man to the earth it sent,
Many a gap by the balls is rent—
O'er the corpse before springs the hinder-man,
That the line may not fail to the fearless van.
To the right, to the left, and around and around,
Death whirls in its dance on the bloody ground.
The sun goes down on the burning fight,
And over the host falls the brooding Night.
Brothers, God grant when this life is o'er,
In the life to come that we meet once more!
The dead men lie bathed in the weltering blood,
And the living are blent in the slippery flood,
And the feet, as they reeling and sliding go,
Stumble still on the corpses that sleep below.
"What, Francis!" "Give Charlotte my last farewell."
Wilder the slaughter roars, fierce and fell.
"I'll give——Look, comrades, beware—beware
How the bullets behind us are whirring there——
I'll give thy Charlotte thy last farewell,
Sleep soft! where death's seeds are the thickest sown,
Goes the heart which thy silent heart leaves alone."
Hitherward—thitherward reels the fight,
Darker and darker comes down the night—
Brothers, God grant when this life is o'er,
In the life to come that we meet once more!

Hark to the hoofs that galloping go!
The Adjutants flying,—
The horsemen press hard on the panting foe,
Their thunder booms in dying—
Victory!
The terror has seized on the dastards all,
And their colours fall.
Victory!
Closed is the brunt of the glorious fight.
And the day, like a conqueror, bursts on the night.
Trumpet and fife swelling choral along,
The triumph already sweeps marching in song.
Live—brothers—live!—and when this life is o'er,
In the life to come may we meet once more!

* * * * *

THE LAST OF THE SHEPHERDS.

CHAPTER I.

I wish I had lived in France in 1672! It was the age of romances in twenty volumes, and flowing periwigs, and high-heeled shoes, and hoops, and elegance, and wit, and rouge, and literary suppers, and gallantry, and devotion. What names are those of La Calprenède, and D'Urfé, and De Scuderi, to be the idols and tutelary deities of a circulating library!—and Sevigné, to conduct the fashionable correspondence of the Morning Post!—and Racine, to contribute to the unacted drama!—and ladies skipping up the steepest parts of Parnassus, with petticoats well tucked up, to show the beauty of their ankles, and their hands filled with artificial flowers—almost as good as natural—to show the simplicity of their tastes! I wish I had lived in France in 1672; for in that year Madame Deshoulieres, who had already been voted the tenth muse by all the freeholders of Pieria, and whose pastorals were lisped by all the fashionable shepherdesses in Paris, left the flowery banks of the Seine to rejoin her husband. Monsieur Deshoulieres was in Guyenne; Madame Deshoulieres went into Dauphiné. Matrimony seems to be rather hurtful to geographical studies, but Madame Deshoulieres was a poetess; and in spite of the thirty-eight summers that shaded the lustre of her cheek, she was beautiful, and was still in the glow of youth by her grace and her talent, and—her heart. Wherever she moved she left crowds of Corydons and Alexises; but, luckily for M. Deshoulieres, their whole conversation was about sheep.

The two Mesdemoiselles Deshoulieres, Madeleine and Bribri, were beautiful girls of seventeen or eighteen, brought up in all the innocent pastoralism of their mother. They believed in all the poetical descriptions they read in her eclogues. They expected to see shepherds playing on their pipes, and shepherdesses dancing, and naiads reclining on the shady banks of clear-running rivers. They were delighted to get out of the prosaic atmosphere of Paris, and all the three were overjoyed when they sprang from their carriage, one evening in May, at the chateau of Madame d'Urtis on the banks of the Lignon. Though there were occasional showers at that season, the mornings were splendid; and accordingly the travellers were up almost by daylight, to tread the grass still trembling 'neath the steps of Astrea—to see the fountain, that mirror where the shepherdesses wove wild-flowers into their hair—and to explore the wood, still vocal with the complaints of Celadon. In one of their first excursions, Madeleine Deshoulieres, impatient to see some of the scenes so gracefully described by her mother, asked if they were really not to encounter a single shepherd on the banks of the Lignon? Madame Deshoulieres perceived, at no great distance, a herdsman and cow-girl playing at chuckfarthing; and, after a pause, replied—

"Behold upon the verdant grass so sweet,
The shepherdess is at her shepherd's feet!
Her arms are bare, her foot is small and white,
The very oxen wonder at the sight;
Her locks half bound, half floating in the air,
And gown as light as those that satyrs wear."

While these lines were given in Madame Deshoulieres' inimitable recitative, the party had come close to the rustic pair. "People may well say," muttered Madeleine, "that the pictures of Nature are always best at a distance. Can it be possible that this is a shepherdess—a shepherdess of Lignon?" The shepherdess was in reality a poor little peasant girl, unkempt, unshorn, with hands of prodigious size, a miraculous squint, and a mouth which probably had a beginning, but of which it was impossible to say where it might end. The shepherd was worthy of his companion; and yet there was something in the extravagant stupidity of his fat and florid countenance that was interesting to a Parisian eye. Madame Deshoulieres, who was too much occupied with the verses of the great D'Urfé to attend to what was before her, continued her description—