* * * * *

4.  “Hush! hark! did stealing steps go by? 
    Came not faint whispers near? 
    No!—­The wild wind hath many a sigh
    Amid the foliage sere.”

* * * * *

5.  “Her giant form
    O’er wrathful surge, through blackening storm,
    Majestically calm, would go,
    Mid the deep darkness, white as snow! 
    But gentler now the small waves glide,
    Like playful lambs o’er a mountain’s side. 
    So stately her bearing, so proud her array,
    The main she will traverse for ever and aye. 
    Many ports will exult at the gleam of her mast. 
    Hush! hush! thou vain dreamer! this hour is her last!”

* * * * *

6.  “Hark! distant voices that lightly
    Ripple the silence deep! 
    No; the swans that, circling nightly,
    Through the silver waters sweep.

   “See I not, there, a white shimmer? 
    Something with pale silken shrine? 
    No; it is the column’s glimmer,
    ’Gainst the gloomy hedge of pine.”

* * * * *

7.  “Hark, below the gates unbarring! 
    Tramp of men and quick commands! 
    ‘’Tis my lord come back from hunting,’
    And the Duchess claps her hands.

   “Slow and tired came the hunters;
    Stopped in darkness in the court. 
    ’Ho, this way, ye laggard hunters! 
    To the hall!  What sport, what sport.’

   “Slow they entered with their master;
      In the hall they laid him down. 
    On his coat were leaves and blood-stains,
      On his brow an angry frown.”

* * * * *

8.  “Now clear, pure, hard, bright, and one by one, like to hailstones,
    Short words fall from his lips fast as the first of a shower,—­
    Now in twofold column, Spondee, Iamb, and Trochee,
    Unbroke, firm-set, advance, retreat, trampling along,—­
    Now with a sprightlier springiness, bounding in triplicate syllables,
    Dance the elastic Dactylics in musical cadences on;
    Now, their voluminous coil intertangling like huge anacondas,
    Roll overwhelmingly onward the sesquipedalian words.”

SELECTIONS.

* * * * *

HERVE RIEL.

On the sea and at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety-two,
Did the English fight the French,—­woe to France! 
And the thirty-first of May, helter-skelter through the blue,
Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks pursue,
Came crowding ship on ship to Saint Malo on the Rance,
  With the English fleet in view.