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While summer's wind blew soft and low, Seated by gallant Hotspur's side, His Katherine was a happy bride, A thousand years ago.

I wandered through the lofty halls
Trod by the Percys of old fame,
And traced upon the chapel walls
Each high, heroic name,

From him who once his standard set
Where now, o'er mosque and minaret,

Glitter the Sultan's crescent moons,
To him who, when a younger son,
Fought for King George at Lexington,
A major of dragoons.

That last half-stanza, it has dashed
From my warm lip the sparkling cup;
The light that o'er my eyebeam flashed,
The power that bore my spirit up
Above this bank-note world, is gone;
And Alnwick 's but a market town,
And this, alas! its market day,

And beasts and borderers throng the way;
Oxen and bleating lambs in lots,
Northumbrian boors and plaided Scots,

Men in the coal and cattle line; From Teviot's bard and hero land, From royal Berwick's beach of sand, From Wooller, Morpeth, Hexham, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

These are not the romantic times
So beautiful in Spenser's rhymes,

So dazzling to the dreaming boy;
Ours are the days of fact, not fable,
Of knights, but not of the round table,
Of Bailie Jarvie, not Rob Roy;
"Tis what "Our President," Monroe,
Has called "the era of good feeling";
The Highlander, the bitterest foe
To modern laws, has felt their blow,
Consented to be taxed, and vote,
And put on pantaloons and coat,

And leave off cattle-stealing:
Lord Stafford mines for coal and salt,
The Duke of Norfolk deals in malt,
The Douglas in red herrings;
And noble name and cultured land,
Palace, and park, and vassal band,
Are powerless to the notes of hand
Of Rothschild or the Barings.

The age of bargaining, said Burke,
Has come to-day the turbaned Turk
(Sleep, Richard of the lion heart!
Sleep on, nor from your cerements start)
Is England's friend and fast ally;

The Moslem tramples on the Greek,
And on the Cross and altar-stone,
And Christendom looks tamely on,
And hears the Christian maiden shriek,
And sees the Christian father die;
And not a saber-blow is given

For Greece and fame, for faith and heaven,
By Europe's craven chivalry.

You'll ask if yet the Percy lives

In the armed pomp of feudal state.
The present representatives

Of Hotspur and his "gentle Kate,"
Are some half-dozen serving-men
In the drab coat of William Penn;

A chambermaid, whose lip and eye,
And cheek, and brown hair, bright and curling,
Spoke nature's aristocracy;
And one, half groom,
half seneschal,
Who bowed me through court, bower, and hall,
From donjon keep to turret wall,
For ten-and-sixpence sterling.

FITZ-GREENE HALLECK.

LONDON.

COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, 1803.

EARTH has not anything to show more fair;
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will.
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

NUREMBERG.

IN the valley of the Pegnitz, where across broad meadow-lands

Rise the blue Franconian mountains, Nuremberg, the ancient, stands.

Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of art and song,

Memories haunt thy pointed gables like the rooks that round them throng:

Memories of the Middle Ages, when the emper- | Through these streets so broad and stately, these ors rough and bold obscure and dismal lanes,

Had their dwellings in thy castle, time-defying, Walked of yore the Mastersingers, chanting rude centuries old; poetic strains;

And thy brave and thrifty burghers boasted, in From remote and sunless suburbs came they to their uncouth rhyme, the friendly guild, That their great, imperial city stretched its hand Building nests in Fame's great temple, as in to every clime.

In the courtyard of the castle, bound with many an iron band,

Stands the mighty linden planted by Queen Cunigunde's hand;

On the square, the oriel window, where in old heroic days

Sat the poet Melchior, singing Kaiser Maximilian's praise.

Everywhere I see around me rise the wondrous world of art;

Fountains wrought with richest sculpture standing in the common mart;

spouts the swallows build.

As the weaver plied the shuttle wove he too the mystic rhyme,

And the smith his iron measures hammered to the anvil's chime,

Thanking God, whose boundless wisdom makes the flowers of poesy bloom

In the forge's dust and cinders, in the tissues of

the loom.

Here Hans Sachs, the cobbler-poet, laureate of the gentle craft,

Wisest of the Twelve Wise Masters, in huge folios sang and laughed.

And above cathedral doorways saints and bishops But his house is now an alehouse, with a nicely carved in stone, sanded floor,

By a former age commissioned as apostles to our And a garland in the window, and his face above

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the door,

Painted by some humble artist, as in Adam Puschman's song,

As the old man gray and dovelike, with his great beard white and long.

And at night the swart mechanic comes to drown his cark and care,

Quaffing ale from pewter tankards, in the master's antique chair.

Vanished is the ancient splendor, and before my dreamy eye

Wave these mingling shapes and figures, like a faded tapestry.

Not thy Councils, not thy Kaisers, win for thee the world's regard,

But thy painter, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Sachs, thy cobbler-bard.

Thus, O Nuremberg, a wanderer from a region far away,

As he paced thy streets and courtyards, sang in thought his careless lay;

Gathering from the pavement's crevice, as a floweret of the soil, The nobility of labor,

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the long pedigree of toil.

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.

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No track of men, no footsteps to and fro,
Lead to her gates. The path lies o'er the Sca,
Invisible; and from the land we went,
As to a floating City, steering in,

And gliding up her streets as in a dream,
So smoothly, silently, -- by many a dome
Mosque-like, and many a stately portico,
The statues ranged along an azure sky;
By many a pile in more than Eastern splendor,
Of old the residence of merchant kings;
The fronts of some, though Time had shattered
them,

Still glowing with the richest hues of art,
As though the wealth within them had run o'er.
A few in fear,

Flying away from him whose boast it was
That the grass grew not where his horse had
trod,

Gave birth to Venice. Like the waterfowl, They built their nests among the ocean waves; And where the sands were shifting, as the wind Blew from the north, the south; where they that

came

Had to make sure the ground they stood upon,
Rose, like an exhalation, from the deep,
A vast Metropolis, with glittering spires,
With theaters, basilicas adorned;

A scene of light and glory, a dominion,
That has endured the longest among men,

And whence the talisman by which she rose Towering? 'T was found there in the barren

sea.

Want led to Enterprise; and, far or near,
Who met not the Venetian? now in Cairo ;
Ere yet the Califa came, listening to hear
Now on the Euxine, on the Sea of Azoph,
Its bells approaching from the Red Sea coast;
In converse with the Persian, with the Russ,
The Tartar; on his lowly deck receiving
Pearls from the gulf of Ormus, gems from Bagdad,
Eyes brighter yet, that shed the light of love
From Georgia, from Circassia. Wandering round,
When in the rich bazaar he saw, displayed,
Treasures from unknown climes, away he went,
And, traveling slowly upward, drew erelong
From the well-head supplying all below;
Making the Imperial City of the East
Herself his tributary.

Thus did Venice rise,
Thus flourish, till the unwelcome tidings came,
That in the Tagus had arrived a fleet
From India, from the region of the Sun,
Fragrant with spices, that a way was found,
A channel opened, and the golden stream
Turned to enrich another. Then she felt
Her strength departing, and at last she fell,
Fell in an instant, blotted out and razed;

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