"Christ ban ye now!"—he cried, the door wide flinging,
"Fare ye some whither with perdition's dole?"
—"We go"—out from the wrack a shriek came ringing—
"To seize the emperor's soul,
"Who lies this hour death-smitten." Execration
Thereat still fouler filled the sulphurous air:
Before the rood the hermit sank:—"Salvation
Grant, Lord! in his despair!"
And agonizing thus, with lips all ashen,
He prayed—till back, with ghastlier rage and roar,
The demon rout rushed, strung to fiercer passion,
And crashed his osier door.
"Speak, fiend!—I do adjure thee!—Came repentance
Too late?"—With wrathful curse was answer made:
—"Heaped high within the Judgment Scales for sentence,
The emperor's sins were laid;
"And downward, downward, with a plunge descended
Our scale, till we exulted!—when a moan,
—'Save, Christ, O save me!'—from his lips was rended
Out with his dying groan.
"Quick in the other scale did Mercy lay it,
Lo! it outweighed his guilt—"
—"Ha,—baffled! braved!"—
The hermit cried;—"Hence, fiends! nor dare gainsay it,
The emperor's soul is saved!"
Margaret J. Prestox.
CHATEAUBRIAND'S DUCKS.
François-Auguste de Chateaubriand, the illustrious author of the Génie du Christianisme, the poet, statesman, diplomatist, soldier, and traveler in the Old World and the New, was one of the two or three human beings who, at the commencement of the nineteenth century, disputed with the emperor Napoleon the attention of Europe. Sprung from an old family of the Breton nobility—a race preserving longer perhaps than any other in France the traditions of the monarchy—he reluctantly gave in his adhesion to the de facto government of Napoleon; but the execution of the duc d'Enghien outraged him profoundly, and sending back to Napoleon his commission as foreign minister, he abjured him for ever. Napoleon probably regretted the fact seriously. "Chateaubriand," said the emperor, "has received from Nature the sacred fire: his works attest it. His style is that of a prophet, and all that is grand and national appertains to his genius."