Is that a footstep on the stair, And on the entry-floor? What sound is that, like breathing, there? There, close beside the door!
Hush! hark! that was a dreadful sigh! So full of woe, so near! It were an easier thing to die Than feel this deadly fear.
One of her ancestors she knew A bloody man had been, They found him here, stabb’d through and through, Murdered in all his sin.
The nurse had often silenced her, With fearful tales of him— God shield her! did not something stir Within that corner dim?
A gleam across the chamber floor— A white thing in the river— One long, shrill, shivering scream, no more, And all is still forever!
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE BROTHERS,” “CROMWELL,” “RINGWOOD THE ROVER,” ETC.
The might and glory which had of yore reared the imperial city to its throne of universal domination, had long ago departed from the degenerate and weak posterity of the world’s conquerors! The name of Roman was but the lucid meteor of the charnel imparting a faint lustre to corruption and decay! The bold hordes of the hardy north had oftentimes already avenged the wrongs done by the elder Cæsar, while the frail silken puppets, who had succeeded to his style and station, trembled in the unguarded capital at every rumor from beyond the Danube. For, to the limits of that mighty river had they extended, years before the time of which we write, their arms, their arts, their sciences, and their religion—the pure and holy doctrines of the crucified Redeemer. All the Dalmatian coast of the bright gulf of Venice, now little more known than the wilds of central Asia, was studded with fair towns, and gorgeous palaces, and gay suburban villas; and all the wide spread plains of Thrace and Thessaly, now forest-clad and pathless, save to the untamed klepht or barbarous tartar, waved white with crops of grain, and blushed with teeming vineyards, and nurtured a dense happy population. At times indeed the overwhelming deluge of barbarian warfare had burst upon those fertile regions; and, wheresoever it burst,
“With sweepy sway Their arms, their arts, their gods were whirled away—”
yet ever, when the refluent billows ebbed, the grass had sprung up green and copious even in the horse tramps of the innumerable cavalry that swelled the armies of the north, and the succeeding summer had smiled on meads and vineyards abundant as before, and on a population careless and free and jocund.