MS. Poem—­(original.)

Night, thick, heavy, deep night!—­No star visible amid the sulphureous blackness of the overcharged clouds; and silence, dreadful as if distilled from the voicelessness of the graves of a buried world!  Night and silence, the twins that keep watch over the destinies of the slumbering earth, which booms round in ceaseless revolution, grand, mystic, sublime, but yearns in the dim vastness of its sunless course, for the bright morning-hour which shall again invest it with a radiance fresh from heaven!  Darkness, and night, and silence! and suddenly rushing down, on whirlwind wings, the storm burst fearfully upon their domain—­wind and rain, and the hollow sound of the swaying branches!  And Lawleigh pressed onward.  His horse, which for several miles had shown symptoms of fatigue now yielded to the difficulties it could no longer encounter; and after a few heavy struggles, fell forward, and did not attempt to rise.  Thirteen hours had elapsed from the time the chase on that day commenced, and unless for a short minute, he had seen nothing of the fugitive.  Yet he had dashed onward, feeling occasionally his holsters, and satisfied that his pistols were in serviceable condition.  He was now nearly as much exhausted as his horse; but determining to yield to no obstruction, he seized the pistols, and proceeded through the wood, leaving his gallant charger to its fate.  Lawleigh was strong and active beyond most men of his day; and, when excited, more vigorous and determined than could have been supposed from the ordinary equanimity of his character.  But here a great murder had been committed!—­before his very eyes!—­accusations had been hazarded!—­and one soft voice dwelt for ever on his ear—­“Find out the murderer, or see me no more.”  Had Lady Alice, indeed, allowed a suspicion to invade her mind, that he had been accessory to the death of Sir Stratford Manvers?  But no!—­he would pursue the dreadful thought no further.  Sufficient that, after many efforts, he had regained a clue to the discovery of the tall man he had seen escape into the thicket.  He had tracked him unweariedly from place to place—­had nearly overtaken him in the cave of Nottingham Hill—­caught glimpses of him in the gipsy camp at Hatton Grange—­and now felt assured he was close upon his track in the savage ranges of Barnley Wold.  Barnley Wold was a wild, uncultivated district, interspersed at irregular intervals with the remains of an ancient forest, and famous, at the period of our narrative, as the resort of many lawless and dangerous characters.  Emerging from one of the patches of wood, which, we have said, studded the immense expanse of the wold, Lawleigh was rejoiced to perceive a faint brightening of the sky, which foretold the near approach of the morning.  He looked all around, and, in the slowly increasing light, he thought he perceived, at the top of a rising ground at some distance, a shepherd’s hut, or one of the rough sheds put up for the accommodation of the woodmen.