With the wholesome spirit of childhood; to God submitting the rest: 
Not seeing the desolate years, the dungeon of Carisbrook drear;
Eyes dry-glazed with fever, and none to lend even a tear! 
Now, all her heart to the little one goes; for, day upon day,
As a rosebud in canker, she pales and pines, and the cough has its way. 
And the gardens of Richmond on Thames, the fine blythe air of the vale
Stay not the waning pulse, and the masters of science fail. 
Then the little footsteps are faint, and a child may take her with ease;
As the flowers a babe flings down she is spread on Elizabeth’s knees,
Slipping back to the cradle-life, in her wasting weakness and pain: 
And the sister prays and smiles and watches the sister in vain.

So she watch’d by the bed all night, and the lights were yellow and low, And a cold blue blink shimmer’d up from the park that was sheeted in snow:  And the frost of the passing hour, when souls from the body divide, The Sarsar-wind of the dawn, crept into the palace, and sigh’d.  And the child just turn’d her head towards Elizabeth there as she lay, And her little hands came together in haste, as though she would pray; And the words wrestled in her for speech that the fever-dry mouth cannot frame, And the strife of the soul on the delicate brow was written in flame:  And Elizabeth call’d ’O Father, why does she look at me so?  Will it soon be better for Anne? her face is all in a glow’:—­ But with womanly speed and heed is the mother beside her, and slips Her arm ’neath the failing head, and moistens the rose of the lips, Pale and sweet as the wild rose of June, and whispers to pray To the Father in heaven, ‘the one she likes best, my baby, to say’:  And the soul hover’d yet o’er the lips, as a dove when her pinions are spread, And the light of the after-life came again in her eyes, and she said; ’For my long prayer it is not time; for my short one I think I have breath; Lighten mine eyes, O Lord, that I sleep not the sleep of death.’  —­O! into life, fair child, as she pray’d, her innocence slept!  ‘It is better for her,’ they said:—­and knelt, and kiss’d her, and wept.

In her; Henrietta’s mother was by birth Mary de’ Medici; the great-grandmother of Charles was Mary of Guise.

‘With Charles I,’ says Ranke, ’nothing was more seductive than secrecy.  The contradictions in his conduct entangled him in embarrassments, in which his declarations, if always true in the sense he privately gave them, were only a hair’s-breadth removed from actual, and even from intentional, untruth.’—­Whether traceable to descent, or to the evil influence of Buckingham and the intriguing atmosphere of the Spanish marriage-negotiations, this defect in political honesty is, unquestionably, the one serious blot on the character of Charles I.—­Yet, whilst noting it, candid students will regretfully confess that the career of Elizabeth and her counsellors is defaced by shades of bad faith, darker and more numerous.