The doctor, a patient; the courtier, a place, Though often, like us, he's flung out in the chase. There is the fairy glen, the pools I mused in youth among, The very nook where first I poured forth unconsidered song, The cit hunts a plumb, while the soldier And stood with gladness in my heart and hunts fame; The poet, a dinner; the patriot, a name; And the practised coquette, though she seems to refuse, In spite of her airs still her lover pursues. bright hope on my brow: Ah! I had other visions then than I have visions now. I went into my native vale. Alas! what did I see? Let the bold and the busy hunt glory and At every door strange faces where glad looks wealth; once welcomed me; All the blessing we ask is the blessing of The sunshine faded on the hills, the music health, left the brooks; With hound and with horn through the The song of its unnumbered larks was as the voice of rooks; woodlands to roam, And when tired abroad find contentment at The plough had been in all my haunts, the home. PAUL WHITEHEAD. axe had touched the grove, And death had followed: there was naught remained for me to love. LOVE. OVE is too great a happiness For wretched mortals to possess; For could it hold inviolate By rigid laws are subject to, proves the pleasanter the colder. SAMUEL BUTLER. THE IRON SHROUD. FROM THE ITALIAN. UST on the summit of the tow- | littered with straw stood in one corner, and ering and precipitous rock of beside it a vessel with water and a coarse Scylla stood the castle of the dish filled with coarser food. prince of Tolfi; it commanded a magnificent view of Sicily in all its grandeur. Here, during the wars of the Middle Ages, when the fertile plains of Italy were devastated by hostile factions, those prisoners were confined for whose ransom a costly price was demanded. Here, too, in a dungeon excavated deep in the solid rock, the miserable victim was immured whom revenge pursued the dark, fierce and unpitying revenge of an Italian heart. Vivenzio, the noble and the generous, the fearless in battle and the pride of Naples in her sunny hours of peace-the young, the brave, the proud Vivenzio-fell beneath this subtile and remorseless spirit. He was the prisoner of Tolfi, and he languished in that rock-encircled dungeon, which stood alone, and whose portals never opened twice upon a living captive. It had the semblance of a vast cage, for the roof and floor and sides were of iron, solidly wrought and spaciously constructed. High above there ran a range of seven grated windows, guarded with massy bars of the same metal, which admitted light and air. Save these and the tall folding-doors beneath them, which occupied the centre, no chink or chasm or projection broke the smooth black surface of the walls. An iron bedstead Even the intrepid soul of Vivenzio shrank with dismay as he entered this abode and heard the ponderous doors triple-locked by the silent ruffians who conducted him to it. Their silence seemed prophetic of his fate, of the living grave that had been prepared for him. His menaces and his entreaties, his indignant appeals for justice and his impatient questioning of their intentions, were alike vain. They listened, but spoke not. Fit ministers of a crime that should have no tongue! no tongue! How dismal was the sound of their retiring steps! And as their faint echoes died along the winding passages a fearful presage grew within him that nevermore the face or voice or tread of man would greet his senses. He had seen human beings for the last time, and he looked his last upon the bright sky and upon the smiling earth and upon a beautiful world he loved and whose minion he had been. Here he was to end his life-a life he had just begun to revel in. And by what means? By secret poison or by murderous assault? No, for then it had been needless to bring him thither. Famine, perhaps-a thousand deaths in one. It was terrible to think of it, but it was yet more terrible to picture long, long years of captivity in a solitude so appalling, a loneliness so dreary, that thought, for want of fellowship, would lose itself in madness or stagnate into idiocy. He could not hope to escape unless he had the power with his bare hands of rending asunder the solid iron walls of his prison; he could not hope for liberty from the relenting mercies of his enemy. His instant death under any form of refined cruelty was not the object of Tolfi, for he might have inflicted it, and he had not. It was too evident, therefore, he was reserved for some premeditated scheme of subtile vengeance; and what vengeance could transcend in fiendish malice either the slow death of famine or the still slower one of solitary incarceration till the last lingering spark of life expired, or till reason fled and nothing should remain to perish but the brute functions of the body? It was evening when Vivenzio entered his dungeon, and the approaching shades of night wrapped it in total darkness as he paced up and down revolving in his mind these horrible forebodings. No tolling bell from the castle or from any neighboring church or convent struck upon his ear to tell how the hours passed. Frequently he would stop and listen for some sound that might betoken the vicinity of man, but the solitude of the desert, the silence of the tomb, are not so still and deep as the oppressive desolation by which he was encompassed. His heart sunk within him, and he threw himself dejectedly upon his couch of straw. Here sleep gradually obliterated the consciousness of misery, and bland dreams wafted his delighted spirit to scenes which were once glowing realities for him, in whose ravishing illusions he soon lost the remembrance that he was Tolfi's prisoner. When he awoke, it was daylight; but how long he had slept he knew not. might be early morning or it might be It sultry noon, for he could measure time by no other note of its progress than light and darkness. He had been so happy in his sleep amid friends who loved him, and the sweeter endearments of those who loved him as friends could not, that in the first moments of waking his startled mind seemed to admit the knowledge of his situation as if it had burst upon it for the first time, fresh in all its appalling horrors. He gazed round with an air of doubt and amazement, and took up a handful of straw upon which he lay as though he would ask himself what it meant. But Memory, too faithful to her office, soon unveiled the melancholy past, while Reason, shuddering at the task, flashed before his eyes the tremendous future. The contrast overpowered him. He remained for some time lamenting like a truth the bright visions that had vanished and recoiling from the present, which clung to him as a poisoned garment. When he grew more calm, he surveyed his gloomy dungeon. Alas! the stronger light of day only served to confirm what the gloomy indistinctness of the preceding evening had partially disclosed-the utter impossibility of escape. As, however, his eyes wandered round and round and from place to place, he noticed two circumstances which excited his surprise and curiosity. The one, he thought, might be fancy, but the other was positive. His pitcher of water and the dish which contained his food had been removed from his side while he slept, and now stood near the door. Were he even inclined to doubt this by supposing he had mistaken the spot where he saw them overnight, he could not; for the pitcher now in his dungeon was of neither the same form nor color as the other, while the food was changed for | food, which he supposed he would do in the some other of better quality. He had been same way as before. The mere thought of visited, therefore, during the night. But how being approached by a living creature, and had the person obtained entrance? Could he the opportunity it might present of learning have slept so soundly that the unlocking and the doom prepared or preparing for him, imopening of those ponderous portals were effect- parted some comfort. Besides, if he came ed without waking him? He would have alone, might he not in a furious onset oversaid this was not possible but that in doing power him? Or he might be accessible to so he must admit a greater difficulty-an en- pity or the influence of such munificent retrance by other means, of which he was con- wards as he could bestow if once more at vinced there existed none. It was not in- liberty and master of himself. Say he were tended, then, that he should be left to perish armed. The worst that could befall, if nor from hunger. But the secret and mysterious bribe nor prayers nor force prevailed, was mode of supplying him with food seemed to a faithful blow, which, though dealt in a indicate he was to have no opportunity of damned cause, might work a desired end. communicating with a human being. The There was no chance so desperate but it other circumstance which had attracted his looked lovely in Vivenzio's eyes compared notice was the disappearance, as he believed, with the idea of being totally abandoned. of one of the seven grated windows that ran The night came, and Vivenzio watched; along the top of his prison. He felt confi- morning came, and Vivenzio was confounded. dent that he had observed and counted them, He must have slumbered without knowing for he was rather surprised at their number, it. Sleep must have stolen over him when and there was something peculiar in their exhausted by fatigue, and in that interval form, as well as in the manner of their of feverish repose he had been baffled; arrangement, at unequal distances. It was for there stood his replenished pitcher of so much easier, however, to suppose he was water, and there his day's meal. Nor was mistaken than that a portion of the solid this all. Casting his looks toward the winiron which formed the walls could have es- dows of his dungeon, he counted but FIVE. caped from its position, that he soon dis- Here was no deception, and he was now conmissed the thought from his mind. vinced there had been none the day before. But what did all this portend? Into what strange and mysterious den had he been cast? Vivenzio partook of the food that was before him without apprehension. It might be poisoned; but if it were, he knew he could not escape death, should such be the design of Tolfi, and the quickest death would be the speediest release. The day passed wearily and gloomily, though not without a faint hope that by keeping watch at night he might observe when the person came again to bring him He gazed till his eyes ached; he could discover nothing to explain the mystery. That it was so he knew; why it was so he racked his imagination in vain to conjecture. He examined the doors; a single circumstance convinced him they had not been opened. A wisp of straw which he had carelessly thrown against them the pre |