of a bird. One seemed to sink as soon as it was touched, and sunk forever. Its crew went down to take a sail in the one-oared skiff of old Charon. But in the meantime the lucky ship had felt the dreadful grappling-iron of a Roman vessel, and its crew soon found how terrible is the Roman in a close engagement. The two men-of-war now lay, literally, "yardarm to yardarm," and a desperate conflict ensued. The shouts of pain and revenge were horrible. The air was full of flying weapons, and from decks and towers they fell like rain; now clashing against brazen shields and armor, now penetrating the corslet of some unfortunate foe, now flashing into the sea. But the grappling-hook gave way, bringing with it a part of the ornaments of the stern, which have since graced a Roman triumph. At the same moment a javelin pierced the side of the pilot of the enemy's vessel; but with his dying hand he turned it out of the reach of the foiled Romans. In another place two vessels had run their bows together and sunk in a common destruction. Here two having had one close engagement changed their course: the yardarms were turned about; the line of vessels was broken; then suddenly they veered back to make a new charge upon each other. But then took place a beautiful manoeuvre of the enemy. As if by a common impulse, their ships turned into a line and, before the Romans had fairly comprehended the intention, nearly surrounded them. But the chafing commander of the Roman fleet gave instant orders to come to close quarters. The attempt succeeded, and in a short time nearly the whole fleet of the enemy was lashed to the Roman galleys. It was a floating bridge, upon which the action that ensued was too terrible for description. Javelins were no longer in use. Swords were drawn. The clangor of metal against metal sounded "like the ringing of a thousand anvils." Vessels were boarded; soldiers hung upon the sides and plunged, with mutilated arms, into the water; bodies fell upon the deck, and the living slipped upon the blood of the dead and dying. The water was tinged with blood and the ships were retarded in their motion by the corpses around them. So Xerxes escaped in his flag-ship, which no longer carried a signal light and which could hardly move among the floating bodies of his soldiers, after the battle of Salamis: he, who ordered the Hellespont to be scourged with three hundred stripes, bound with two chains, beaten with clubs and branded, because it had swept away his bridge; he, whose tumultuous hosts are said to have drank rivers dry as they marched to the field of battle. The battle is over. The Romans are, as ever, victorious. fire-ships, such as those which won the battle of Actium, full of pitch and sulphur, completed the work of the sword. Music resounds on the deck of every Roman vessel which has escaped the catastrophe. Its bows are hung with laurel, wreaths and garlands. The decks are piled with the ornaments of the enemy's ships; but no "prizes" follow the triumphant fleet. A naval bat

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tle is a battle of annihilation to one party or another. The youthful admiral is crowned with bays, and, when he reaches Rome, will receive a crown of gold, wrought with representations of the beaks of ships.

EPILOGUE.

It will be noticed that we have been arbitrary in the names which we have given to the various classes of Roman vessels. It was necessary to give some names, and we have used those which seemed to be appropriate to the objects for which the vessels were. respectively used.

In our next prologue we shall introduce some gorgeous stories from Lucan about naval battles, accidents and victories.

MUSIC OF THE PINES.

BY ABRAHAM MESSLER, D. D.

The rocking pines of the forest roared.-MRS. HEMANS.

Ye are singing yet, ye tall old pines ;

But your mirth is not like the songs of earth;
For it chimes as loud when the year declines,
As in spring-tide hours and the flowret's birth.

I heard it first in the morning breeze,

Like the silver tone of a spirit's voice;

And it seemed, as it swept through the old green trees,
Like an angel's song-like a seraph's voice.

Then around me waked the summer's breath,
And I heard you sing-it was sweeter still-
Like the softest notes of the dirge of death,
Or the murmuring cadence of a rill.

I heard it again on a calm bright eve,

When the flower's perfume was wafted round ;
And I thought, the sons of light might leave
Their radiant haunts for this silent grove.

It whispered sweet in a soft, clear chime,
Like the notes of a Faery's tiny flute,
When he sings in his own bright sunny clime,
When every sound but joy is mute.

And I heard it too when the loud winds roar'd,

And winter raved in its maddest might;

And the lofty anthem roar'd, and soar'd

From the rocking branch of the tree-top's height.

And ye are joyful yet, ye ancient pines,

Though the mirth of birds' no longer's heard;
And the summer sun's last radiance shines,
And the sounds of winter's dirge are stirred.

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR AND HENRY THE SECOND

We admire an ambitious conqueror as we do the devil. The Prince of Darkness towering in intellect, profound in policy, superhuman in eloquence, daring in enterprise, dauntless in battle, heroic even in his hopelessness, and swaying, with the lofty command of his own imperial spirit, not only men but angels, is a being whom we conteinplate with wonder and awe. He is one of the mightiest among the sons of the mighty; an archangel ruined, yet an archangel still; the monarch of millions; the grand controlling and animating MIND in a kingdom second only to His who governs all! Nevertheless it is the very greatness of this being which invests him with terror; and we admire him as we admire the shock of an earthquake, or the devouring energy of a tempest.

There is a sublimity in power, whether it be good or bad; and as evil power is usually more impetuous and appalling in its operations than benignant power; the limited faculties of man are often more deeply impressed with its majesty. The illimitable ocean is, to many, a less sublime spectacle than a cataract; the vast sun rolling in splendor through the sky, and sustaining his glorious retinue of orbs, is to multitudes not so august as an erup

tion of Hecla or Vesuvius.

Now on the same principle, the march of a conqueror through an outraged land may so occupy the imagination with its grandeur as to exclude the idea of the horrors that attend it; and as we picture to ourselves the long array of his legions, the gleam of their helms and corslets flashing o'er the fields, their ensigns waving interminably to the horizon's verge, the gorgeous troop of chieftains and bannermen which surrounds his car; and as we seem to hear the swell of martial harmonies inspiring valor and measuring the tramp of his countless host, we forget that all is but an organization of death, an instrument of force subjected to a despot's will, a huge engine of power to blast and destroy, to rush at one man's bidding on a devoted territory, deforming the soil with blood and ashes, darkening heaven with the smoke of ruin, and mingling its roar with the wail of desolation. And in the actual combat we are more oblivious still. Our fancy becomes fired as the struggle proceeds. The din of battle, the noise of the captains and the shouting, the shock of charging squadrons, the bravery that laughs at death, the capture and the rescue, the assault and the repulse, the rout and the rally, the high-plumed leaders conspicuous amid the strife, the magnificent composure of the Chief hurling his living masses, obedient as bolts in the hand of Jove, against barriers of glittering steel-all conspire to exclude from memory and thought the horrors of the scene-the mangled limbs, the hoof-beaten bosoms, the ghastly faces of the dead, and

the still more tremendous misery-the agony, the cries, the convulsions, the despair of the dying. Even the demon-visage of injustice appears partially ennobled when it manifests the high attributes of courage and power; and ambition looks sublime in the robes of intellectual greatness.

It is thus that our imagination fools us. For what can be more atrocious than the career of an invader; what more brutishly stupid than that men should dignify with the name of glory, their mustering and moving as mere units in a pack of blood-hounds, mere drops in a deluge of destroyers? It is their lord and leader who does all. They are only arrows in his quiver, stones in his scrip, stakes in his rampart, blocks to fill a gap and impede the foe. It was Alexander who conquered Darius, and not the Macedonians the Medes. A thief invades my property and is sent to a felon's cell; a murderer attempts my life, and a jail is his portion; but a king or an emperor, a consul or a triumvir, invades my country, desolates my hearth, desecrates my altar, violates my wife, massacres my children, stabs myself, possesses my estate, enslaves my kinsmen; yet to hang him on a tree would be infamous-to imprison him on a rock or in a dungeon, would be pitiful revenge! Bless your heart! he is a conqueror, a great warrior-no petty plunderer and assassin, but one who robs a realm and lies in wait for thousands; and he must be treated accordingly. The proper punishment of his crime is to send him home, that he may mourn over the sufferings and fall of the gallant soldiers who went to shoot and be shot-to slay and be slain-because he bade them; and who sought the glory, as Byron sings with shrewd simplicity, of bullets in their bodies, and their names in a bulletin! Poor souls! how he laments their fate! If he had had two or three myriads more of them he might have won; and then, you know, the more death, the more glory, both for them and him!

Falstaff was not so good a poet as Homer, but he was a much better philosopher. The fat knight's soliloquy on honor, is worth twenty Iliads, so far as sober sense goes. They say that Shakspeare's muse was more a comic than a tragic one, and we can fancy him laughing in his sleeve at martial glory-at the heroic aspirations of a subaltern, or a full private-while he seems to rejoice and revel like a charger amid the pomp and circumstance of war, and to rush like an omnipresent and inspiring Mars through the ranks of his buskined combatants. Nevertheless, moralize or be merry as we may on the subject of conquest, history without it would be as uninteresting as an old almanac. A nation that does not fight is a poor affair. Its annals are not worth reading. Therefore blaze away my boys! Be glorious, and supply some Livy or Polybius with materials for a book!

Now the two heroes whose names stand rubric to this article, were undoubtedly great men. Their mail-clad effigies rise prominent in the temple of history. The chivalry of William plowed down that soil whence has sprung the mightiest nation of the No. 4.

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modern world, the inroads of Henry planted a Upas tree, and sowed dragon's teeth in the plains of one of the most miserable. Whence the difference in the two results? That is the question we propose to answer.

Our somewhat rambling prelude is sufficient to indicate that, however much we may admire military talent-that however far our fancy may mislead us in meditating feats of broil and battlewe detest invasion and deprecate ambitious conquest as heartily as we sympathize with the champions of freedom, and reverence the truly great men who stand compact and steadfast like a rock amid assailing waves, lost to sight at times among the multitudinous breakers, but still emerging, high and terrible, as they retreat, and leave their streams in the furrows of its brow. This is real sublimity-power manifested and magnified by the vastness of the opposition it withstands, undimmed by the shadow of wrong, and radiant with the dawning splendor of liberty's glad sun!

But we must take things as they are. Countries will be conquered. Empires will be swept off

Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, where are they?"—

Dynasties will change. Far descended nobles will be degraded to serfs, and their children will till, for a foreign lord, the fields over which the stronghold of their fathers frowned, while humble adventurers rise to distinction, and the peasant or mechanic who has followed the invader assumes the patrician mantle in the subjugated realm. Like the disruptions of geology, there are catastrophes in states which break up and overlay the social soil, either burying it entirely, or compounding its elements into new forms improved or deteriorated as the case may be. This seems as much the nature of things in the moral as in the material world. And as in the one, so in the other, it is an interesting and instructive study to analyze the resultant product and learn the causes of its excellence or its inferiority.

Let us suppose, therefore, that the conquest and permanent occupation of a country have been resolved on; and what are the measures which ought to be adopted for the success of the expedition and the subsequent establishment of peace and prosperity in the land? The information of history is sufficiently clear upon this point; but we select for illustration the doings of William the Conqueror and Henry II-the invasion and possession of England and of Ireland. The process of conquest and subjugation requires wisdom, vigor and time. The military power employed must be so great as to quell every opposition at first and for a long period afterwards effectually to suppress revolt. Such conquests as those of Mexico and Peru do not overthrow this rule; for these enterprises, although successful, were certainly far more romantic than prudent, and owed their prosperity to enthusiastic valor combined with perfidy and cruelty on the one hand, and superstitious awe united to ignorance of European warfare on the other. And