Now, the silver shrine contained, wrapped in purple and silk, the relics of Saint Hervé. The oaken cradle was the same in which he slept to the songs of the bard and his poet-wife, whom God had given him for father and mother.
To-day the ducal reliquary is no longer in existence. The metal, thrice consecrated by sanctity, justice, and royalty, was stolen and melted down in that sadly memorable epoch when these three things, trampled under foot, were valued less than a bit of silver. But the wooden cradle of the humble patron of the singers of Brittany, that poor worm-eaten cradle, so like his fate on earth, exists still, and more than one mendicant having respectfully pressed his lips upon it, as in other times, goes away singing with a clearer voice and a comforted heart.
From Once a Week.
LOST FOR GOLD.
She stood by the hedge where the orchard slopes
Down to the river below;
The trees all white with their autumn hopes
Looked heaps of drifted snow;
They gleamed like ghosts through the twilight pale.
The shadowy river ran black;
"It's weary waiting," she said, with a wail,
"For them that never come back.
"The mountain waits there, barren and brown,
Till the yellow furze comes in spring
To crown his brows with a golden crown,
And girdle him like a king.
The river waits till the summer lays
The white lily on his track;
But it's weary waiting nights and days
For him that never comes back.
"Ah! the white lead kills in the heat of the fight.
When passions are hot and wild;
But the red gold kills by the fair fire-light
The love of father and child.
"'Tie twenty years since I heard him say,
When the wild March morn was airy,
Through the drizzly dawn--'I m going away,
To make you a fortune, Mary.'
[{827}]
"Twenty springs, with their long grey days.
When the tide runs up the sand,
And the west wind catches the birds, and lays
Them shrieking far inland.
"From the sea-wash'd reefs, and the stormy mull,
And the damp weed-tangled caves:--
Will he ever come back, O wild sea-gull.
Across the green salt waves?
"Twenty summers with blue flax bells,
And the young green corn on the lea,
That yellows by night in the moon, and swells
By day like a rippling sea.
"Twenty autumns with reddening leaves,
In their glorious harvest light
Steeping a thousand golden sheaves,
And doubling them all at night.
"Twenty winters, how long and drear!
With a patter of rain in the street.
And a sound in the last leaves, red and sere;
But never the sound of his feet.
The ploughmen talk by furrow and ridge,
I hear them day by day;
The horsemen ride down by the narrow bridge,
But never one comes this way.
And the voice that I long for is wanting ther,
And the face I would die to see,
Since he went away in the wild March air,
Ah! to make a fortune for me.
"O father dear I but you never thought
Of the fortune you squandered and lost;
Of the duty that never was sold and bought.
And the love beyond all cost.
"For the vile red dust you gave in thrall
The heart that was God's above;
How could you think that money was all,
When the world was won for love?
"You sought me wealth in the stranger's land,
Whose veins are veins of gold;
And the fortune God gave was in mine hand,
When yours was in its hold.
"If I might but look on your face," she says,
"And then let me have or lack;
But it's weary waiting nights and days
For him that never comes back."
From The Dublin University Magazine.
THE SOLUTION OF THE NILE PROBLEM. [Footnote 195]
[Footnote 195: "The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile, and Exploration of the Nile Sources." By Samuel White Baker, M.A., F.R.G.S. London: Macmillan. & Co. 1865.]
For some time the complaint of those who have been everywhere, and seen everything men of travel and of fashion ought to see, has been that the world is "used-up" for the tourist. Where can he now go for a fresh sensation? Asia and America remain no more untrodden fields than Europe; and as for the isles of the farthest sea, rich and idle "fugitives and vagabonds" have braved as many dangers among savage tribes as the early missionaries, from impulse no nobler than restlessness. Whither next shall they direct their strides? Iceland stood in favor for a year or two; but the cooks are bad there, and the inhabitants speak Latin. Japan has novelties, but bland Daimios are not trustworthy. The sightseeker has no relish for being among a people who, on very slight provocation, may perform upon him a process akin to their own "happy despatch." In the exhaustion of interest in mere horizontal locomotion, the Cain-like race we form part of try the effect of ascension to the highest and hugest cloud-capped peaks; but Matterhorn accidents have rather brought these mountains-of-the-(full)-moon performances into disfavour. Pending the discovery of some new wonder or feat, to occupy many vacant minds and stir a few energetic ones, and during the crisis of a Continental war, the migratory section amongst us must bear their misery as best they can. It may console them to hope that the flying-machine will yet be perfected, and air-sailing supersede Alpine climbing. Probably it would be quite as exciting, and it would not tire the limbs. If there be one geographical problem still left unsolved, it must be to find the site of that cave of Adullam which has sorely puzzled numbers of erudite Parliamentarians, one of whom was heard to make answer to a query regarding its locality that he "never was a geographer." For the purpose of stimulating the curiosity of the gentleman, and of guiding him in his search among the lore of school-boy days, we may take from a book well known a real, and not figurative, description of the Cave in which shelter was lately found by some forty wayfarers uncertain as to their route in a difficult country. "Leaving our horses," says an Adullamite, who long preceded them, "in charge of wild------, and taking one for a guide, we started for the cave, having a fearful gorge below, gigantic cliffs above, and the path winding along a shelf of the rock, narrow enough to make the nervous among us shudder. At length, from a great rock hanging on the edge of this shelf, we sprang by a long leap into a low window which opened into the perpendicular face of the cliff. We were then within the hold of, ------ and creeping half-doubled through a narrow crevice for a few rods, we stood beneath the dark vault of the first grand chamber of this mysterious and oppressive cavern. Our whole collection of lights did little more than make the damp darkness visible. After groping about as long as we had time to spare, we returned to the light of day, fully convinced that with ------ and his lion-hearted followers inside, all the strength of ------ under ------ could not have forced an entrance." Next to a search for the celebrated cave, we can [{829}] imagine no geographical extravagance equal to one for those Nile Sources that have been the dream of ancients and moderns. The undertaking possessed an the attraction of freshness. Your North-west passage is a mere track through a waste, without the possibility of novelty. What its dangers and privations, its few monotonous sights and events, were to half-a-dozen navigators they would be to half-a-dozen more. But in passing upward to the huge plateau in Central Africa where the Nile Basin lies, itself again overtopped by the lofty range of the Blue Mountains, down which giant cascades ceaselessly roll in unwitnessed splendor, the traveller encounters perils enough, but relieved with a human interest. The tribes he meets are many and unique in their habits, strangely unlike each other, within short distances, and having about them an extraordinary mixture of an incipient civilization with some of the most depraved of the customs of savage life. In the journey, too, there is endless variety. The expedition up the river, with its hunting episodes, its difficulties with mutinous servants and seamen, its devices to appease native cupidity and circumvent native cunning, and its encounters with those vilest of the pursuers of commerce, the slave-traders, forms one part of the interest; and next come inland rides through tangled forest shades, rude villages of cone-shaped huts, suspicious hordes of naked barbarians, to whom every new face is that of a plunderer of slaves or cattle, and "situations" in which it is impossible for the honest traveller to escape sharp contests with a party of Turkish marauders, for whose sins against the commandment he would otherwise be held responsible by the relentless javelin-men of the desert. All this offers adventure of a genuine description to him who has the love of it in his disposition; and such a man is Mr. Samuel White Baker. His impulses are irrepressible: nature made him a traveller. He is the modern counterpart of those primitive personages, the Columbuses of the times just succeeding the flood, whose purposeless wanderings into far space from the spot where the Mesopotamian cradle of mankind was rocked, peopled lands lying even beyond great seas; men whose feats were such that the philosophers of five thousand years after can hardly believe they performed them. If Mr. Baker had been a dweller in Charran, he would have begged the patriarch Abraham to give him camels, water-bags, and bushels of corn, and would have set off for the eastern margin of the globe, and the shores of the loud-sounding sea. Arrived there, he would have burned a tree hollow, and launched boldly forth upon the deep, to go whithersoever fortune listed.