At a palace we tarried, and there one lay On his last sad couch, at the close of day; He struggled hard, but Death’s face said “No! Duty is mine, wheresoever I go: Peasant or king, it is all the same, Mine must thou be--I have here thy name!”
We hovered around where a Christian sire Lay waiting to join the eternal choir; Peaceful and calm was his holy repose; He sank as the sun on a May-day’s close: He rose as the sun with beams tricked anew, When flowers bend with beauty, and leaves with dew.
We crossed the path of a beautiful bark, How many the corses, all stiff and stark! Down sank the vessel beneath the wild wave, No hand was near one poor soul to save! We glanced at a ship by an iceberg crushed, We gazed but a moment--then all was hushed.
We asked of a miser to yield up his gold, But he loosed not his clutch when his hands were cold. We entered a town, as it shook to and fro, An earthquake was raging in fury below; Dwellings were rocking like trees when storm-tost, Crashing and sinking--till all were lost!
We stayed our flight o’er a funeral pile, Where the Ganges roll’d swift through a deep defile; Where Brahmin priests rent with cries the air, While the victim lay burning and crackling there; And the devotees of dark Jaggernath We saw mangled and torn in its bloody path.
We paused a while where a family stood, Partaking the sacred “body and blood;” And we saw their mother unfaltering pray, When life’s mellow evening way failing away; And as she sighed out her last tremulous breath, Was ended my first wild ride with Death.
ANCIENT SEAL OF THE ISLAND OF SAINT COLMOC.
The prefixed woodcut of an impression of an ancient monastic seal hitherto unpublished, will, we think, interest some of our readers both in Scotland and Ireland, as, though it is certainly not Irish, it is intimately connected with that bright period of our history when Ireland sent forth her crowds of learned ecclesiastics to preach the gospel and instruct the people, not only to Scotland and England, but also to Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Mecklenburg, and even distant Iceland, in all which their memories are still venerated as patron saints--that period to which Spenser alludes in the lines: