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As the twilight deepened the moon became totally obscured, dark cloudmasses spread over the heavens, the sea grew black, distant thunder rolled, and the sob of an approaching tempest became distinctly audible. Such indications of a westerly gale were not encouraging to those cumbrous vessels, with the treacherous quicksands of Flanders under their lee.

At an hour past midnight it was so dark that it was difficult for the most practiced eye to pierce far into the gloom. But a faint dip of oars now struck the ears of the Spaniards as they watched from the decks. A few moments afterward the sea became suddenly luminous, and six flaming vessels appeared at a slight distance, bearing steadily down upon them before the wind and tide. There were men in the Armada who had been at the siege of Antwerp, only a few years before. They remembered with horror the devil-ships of Gianibelli, those floating volcanoes, which had seemed to rend earth and ocean, whose explosion had laid so many thousands of soldiers dead at a blow, and which had shattered the bridge and floating forts of Farnese as though they had been toys of glass. They knew too that the famous engineer was at that moment in England.

In a moment one of those terrible panics which spread with such contagious rapidity among large bodies of men seized upon the Spaniards. There was a yell throughout the fleet-"The fire-ships of Antwerp! the fire-ships of Antwerp!" and in an instant every cable was cut, and frantic attempts were made by each galleon and galliass to escape what seemed imminent destruction. The confusion was beyond description. Four or five of the largest ships became entangled with each other; two others were set on fire by the flaming vessels, and were consumed.

So long as night and darkness lasted the confusion and uproar continued. When the Monday morning dawned several of the Spanish vessels lay disabled, while the rest of the fleet was seen at a distance of two leagues from Calais, driving toward the Flemish coast. The threatened gale had not yet begun to blow, but there were fresh squalls from the W. S. W., which to such awkward sailers as the Spanish vessels were difficult to contend with. On the other hand, the English fleet was all astir and ready to pursue the Spaniards, now rapidly drifting into the North Sea.

standing N. N. E., The English came

The invincible Armada, already sorely crippled, was directly before a fresh topsail breeze from the S. S. W. up with them soon after nine o'clock A. M., off Gravelines, and found them sailing in a half-moon, the admiral and vice-admiral in the center, and the flanks protected by the three remaining galliasses and by the great galleons of Portugal.

The battle lasted six hours long, hot and furious. Keeping within musketrange, the well-disciplined English mariners poured broadside after broadside against the towering ships of the Armada, which afforded so easy a mark; while the Spaniards, on their part, found it impossible, while wasting incredible quantities of powder and shot, to inflict any severe damage on their enemies. Throughout the action not an English ship was destroyed, not a hundred men were killed. On the other hand, all the best ships of the Spaniards were riddled through and through, and with masts and yards shattered, sails and rigging torn to shreds, and a north-west wind still drifting them toward the fatal sand-banks of Holland, they labored heavily in a chopping sea, firing

wildly, and receiving tremendous punishment at the hands of Howard, Drake, Seymour, Winter, and their followers.

Up to this period the weather, though occasionally threatening, had been moderate. During the week which succeeded the eventful night off Calais neither the Armada nor the English ships had been much impeded in their maneuvers by storms of heavy seas. But on the following Sunday (14th of August) there was a change. The wind shifted again to the south-west, and during the whole of that day and the Monday blew a tremendous gale. "'T was a more violent storm," said Howard, "than was ever seen before at this time of the year."

Over the invincible Armada, last seen by the departing English midway between the coasts of Scotland and Denmark, the blackness of night seemed suddenly to descend. A mystery hung for a long time over their fate. Damaged, leaking, without pilots, without a competent commander, the great fleet entered that furious storm, and was whirled along the iron crags of Norway, and between the savage rocks of Faröe and the Hebrides. In those regions of tempest the insulted North wreaked its full vengeance on the insolent Spaniards. Disaster after disaster marked their perilous track; gale after gale swept them hither and thither, tossing them on sand-banks or shattering them against granite cliffs. The coasts of Norway, Scotland, Ireland, were strewn with the wrecks of that pompous fleet which claimed the dominion of the seas; with the bones of those invincible legions which were to have sacked London and made England a Spanish viceroyalty. The invincible Armada had not only been vanquished, but annihilated.

XX. THE GOLDEN CITY. MACKAY.

Weary and sickening of the dull debate
And clang of politics;-weary of hate,
And sorrow, and calamity, and crime
Of daily history told us in our time;-
Weary of wrong that reared its hydra head,
And hiss'd from all its mouths; dispirited
With rich man's apathy to poor man's hurt,
And poor men's ignorance of their own desert,
And for a moment hopeless of mankind
And the great cause nearest to my mind-
Progress-the dream of poet and of sage-

I leaned back in my chair, and dropp'd the page,
Diurnal,-filled with all the misery,

And fell asleep,-if sleeping it could be,

When, in their natural sequence in the brain,

Thought followed thought, more palpable and plain

Than when I waked; when words took music-voice,

And all my being inly did rejoice.

And what I saw I sang of at the time

With ease unparalleled by waking rhyme,

And to this tune, which, many a day since then,

A haunting music, has come back again.

Oh, the golden-city,
Shining far-away!

With its domes-and steeples tall,
And the sunlight—over all;—
With the waters of a bay
Rippling gently at its feet-

Oh, the golden-city,-so beautiful to seel-
It shall open wide its portals,

And I'll tell you if it be

The city of the happy,

The city of the free.

Oh, the glorious city,
Shining far away!

In its boundaries-every man
Makes his happiness—a plan,
That he studies night—and day,
Till he thinks it not alone,
Like his property,-his own-

Oh the glorious city,-so beautiful to see!—

But spreads it round about him;

Till all are bless'd as he;

His mind-an inward sunshine,

And bright-eternally.

Oh, the splendid city,
Gleaming far away!
Every man by love possess'd

Has a priest within his breast,

And whene'er he kneels to pray

Never breathes a thought unkind

Against men of other mind—

Oh, the glorious city,—so beautiful to see! —
But knows that God-eternal

Will shower all blessings free

On hearts that live to love Him,

And cling-to charity.

Oh, the gorgeous city,

Shining far away!—

Neither misery nor crime,

Nor the wrongs of ancient time,

Nor the kingly lust of-sway

Ever come within its wall

To degrade or to inthrall—

Oh, the glorious city,-so beautiful to see!—

But peace and love—and knowledge,

The civilizing THREE,

Still prove by GOOD that has been

The better that may be.

241

Thus dream'd I, to this rhyme, or something near,
But far more copious,-musical,—and clear.
And when I wakened, still my fancy ran.

'T was not all dream;—and that large hopes for man
Were not such idle visions as the wise,

In days like ours, should heedlessly despise.

I thought that love might be religion yet,
Not form alone, but soul and substance met,—
The guide, the light, the glory of the mind,
Th' electric link uniting all mankind.

That if men loved, and made their love—the law,
All else would follow;-more than ever saw
Poet or prophet in the utmost light

Of heavenly glory opening on his sight.
But dream or no dream, take it as it came,
It gave me hope;-it may give you the same;
And as bright hopes make the intention strong,
Take heart with me, and muse upon my-song.

XXI.-THE WING. MICHELET.

Wings! wings! to sweep

O'er mountain high and valley deep.
Wings, that my heart may rest

In the radiant morning's breast.

Wings to hover free

O'er the dawn-impurpled sea.

Wings! 'bove life to soar,

And beyond death for evermore.

It is the cry of the whole earth, of the world, of all life; it is that which every species of animals or plants utters in a hundred diverse tongues-the voice which issues from the very rock and the inorganic creation: "Wings! we seek for wings, and the power of flight and motion!" Yea, the most inert bodies rush greedily into the chemical transformations which will make them part and parcel of the current of the universal life, and bestow upon them the organs of movement and fermentation.

Yea, the vegetables, fettered by their immovable roots, expand their secret loves toward a winged existence, and commend themselves to the winds, the waters, the insects, in quest of a life beyond their narrow limits-of that gift of flight which nature has refused to them.

We contemplate pityingly those rudimentary animals, the unau and the ai, sad and suffering images of man, which can not advance a step without a groan-sloths or tardigrades. The names by which we identify them we might justly reserve for ourselves. If slowness be relative to the desire of movement, to the constantly futile effort to progress, to advance, to act, the true tardigrade is man. His faculty of dragging himself from one point of the earth to another, the ingenious instruments which he has recently invented in aid of this faculty-all this does not lessen his adhesion to the earth; he is not the less firmly chained to it by the tyranny of gravitation. I see upon earth but one order of created beings which enjoy the power of ignoring or beguiling, by their freedom and swiftness of motion, this universal sadness of impotent

aspiration. I mean those beings which belong to earth, so to speak, only by the tips of their wings; which the air itself cradles and supports, most frequently without being otherwise connected with them than by guiding them at their need and their caprice.

A life of ease, yet sublime! With what a glance of scorn may the weakest bird regard the strongest and swiftest of quadrupeds—a tiger, a lion! How it may smile to see them in their utter powerlessness bound, fastened to the earth which they terrify with vain and useless roarings-with the nocturnal wailings that bear witness to the bondage of the so-called king of animals, fettered, as we all are, in that inferior existence which hunger and gravitation equally prepare for us.

Oh, the fatality of the appetites! the fatality of motion which compels us to drag our unwilling limbs along the earth! Implacable heaviness which binds each of our feet to the dull, rude element wherein death will hereafter resolve us, and says: "Son of the earth, to the earth thou belongest! A moment released from its bosom, thou shalt lie there henceforth for ages." Do not let us inveigh against nature. It is assuredly the sign that we inhabit a world still in its first youth-still in a state of barbarism-a world of essay and apprenticeship, in the grand series of stars-one of the elementary stages of the sublime imitation. This planet is the world of a child; and thou, thou art a child. From this lower school thou shalt be emancipated also. Thy wings shall be majestic and powerful. Thou shalt win and deserve while here, by the sweat of thy brow, a step forward in liberty.

Let us make an experiment. Ask of the bird while still in the egg what he would wish to be. Give him the option. Wilt thou be a man, and share in that royalty of the globe which men have won by art and toil? No, he will immediately reply. Without calculating the immense exertion, the labor, the sweat, the care, the life of slavery by which we purchase sovereignty, he will have but one word to say: "A king myself by birth of space and light, why should I abdicate when man, in his loftiest ambitions, in his highest aspirations after happiness and freedom, dreams of becoming a bird and taking unto himself wings?"

It is in his sunniest time, his first and richest existence, in his day-dreams of youth, that man has sometimes the good fortune to forget that he is a man, a slave to hard fate, and chained to earth. Behold yonder him who flies abroad, who hovers, who dominates over the world, who swims in the sunbeam! He enjoys the ineffable felicity of embracing at a glance an infinity of things which yesterday he could only see one by one. Obscure enigma of detail suddenly made luminous to him who perceives its unity! To see the world beneath one's self, to embrace it, to love it! How divine, how lofty a dream! Do not wake me, I pray you, never wake me! But what is this? Here again are day, uproar, and labor; the harsh iron hammer, the ear-piercing bell with its voice of steel dethrone and dash me headlong; my wings are rent. Dull earth, I fall to thee! Bruised and bent I return to the plow.

When at the close of the last century man formed the daring idea of giving himself up to the winds, of mounting in the air without rudder or oar or means of guidance, he proclaimed aloud that at length he had secured his pinions-had eluded nature and conquered gravitation. Cruel and tragical catastrophes gave the lie to this ambition. He studied the economy of the

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