about this, for he had regained his self-pos- | session and his coolness. "You will not pass me," he exclaimed, " until I know who or what you are!"

The page must have been well prepared, for he had scarce uttered the words before the figure leaped upon him like a tiger on its prey, and tried to hurl him to the ground.

.

It did not succeed, however. The page seized the man in his arms, almost without yielding a step, and a silent struggle commenced, about which he never liked to speak afterwards, for he felt from the commencement that his assailant was the stronger, and determined on having his enemy's life for his own; he did not hope to gain the victory, and he was too proud to call for assistance.

His only good fortune was, that his assailant must have walked some distance in the cold, so that his fingers were benumbed, and he was not able to draw his dagger, which the baron plainly felt beneath his dress, when he pressed him closely to him in the death-struggle.

reflection, he said, "You have broken your oath to your master, Revel-I despise you for it—and yet I will risk my word and trust to yours. Promise me, on your honor, that you will never attempt this again, and never tell the Princess who or what is the cause of it, then I will save you for her sake."

The Count promised. The Baron then led him hurriedly into the ante-room, where he changed his own dress, and silently intimated to the Count that he should put on the grenadier's cloak and follow him. Then he accompanied him to the gate, and said to me, when I had let the Count out, and was again fastening the bolt: "The Count von Revel's name must not be entered in the book; every thing else is in order, Mathies. I will go and have a sound sleep; mind that I am called precisely at five o'clock, for I must take in my report at six."

He must have been tired to death, he looked so sad, and his eyes were quite dim. In consequence, I did not ask him any further questions, but wished him "Good-night."

The next morning the Duke admitted him directly, though his Highness had hardly left his bed, and received him with a meaning inquiry: "And now, my dear Baron."

Thus they at length fell to the ground, one above the other alternately, so that the page felt the warm breath which streamed out from behind his enemy's silken mask. At length, however, the page managed to draw his dag-page replied, and was then silent. ger, and, in his unbounded fury, was about to strike, when his opponent suddenly quitted his hold, and whispered, as if ashamed to beg his life-"Bilgram, I am Revel; I give myself up on my word: but listen to me.'

"It will not return, your Highness," the

The page hesitated a moment before withdrawing the dagger from his breast; but a sudden attack of trembling assailed him; he loosed his hold and rose to his feet. Quite exhausted, he leaned against the wall; the strangest thoughts flitted across his mind, like swallows round a church tower, where one is no sooner gone than another arrives; until, at length, the Duke's words occurred to him, "He must not come again."

His opponent had, in the mean while, also risen, and they stood opposite one another for a while, gasping for breath.

At length the page said, "I must know what you do here, if I am to help myself or you.'

"A short question-a short reply," the count rejoined; "I love the Princess Marie, and she loves me in return. They have shut her up, so that I can only reach her by employing this superstitious tale. She and I are both lost if you speak."

"She loves him, and she is lost." A sharp pain pierced the page's heart; but after long

"But what was it?" the Duke asked, with evident pleasure.

"It will not return, your Highness," the page repeated. "I pledge you my word. That I may be allowed to pass over the details is a favor which my prince, as first gentleman of the land, will not refuse me, for my honor closes my lips."

The Duke was astonished; still, thoughts may have occurred to him, to which he did not like to give way, and which it were better to veil in mystery. He walked hurriedly to the page, and said: "Your word is enough have you any favor to ask? If so, it is granted you beforehand."

"Your Highness's kindness has prevented a request which I hardly dared to ask. I hear that the Second Regiment of Hussars has received orders to march, and I should desire to be appointed to it."

The Prince looked at him, and nodded; he, however, made no other reply to the request, although he dismissed the page very kindly. In the ante-room, Count von Revel was waiting as usual. He and the page saluted one another, because the other adjutants were standing around; but from that time they never spoke again, nor, I believe, did they ever meet.

Now they are all gone, and their restless- | von Revel alone enjoyed himself all his life, ness has become peace.

The best of them all death carried off first. The page entered on the campaign as captain, and returned a colonel and a cripple. There was no hope that the invalid would recover, although the Duke did every thing in his power to save him.

The Queen was never happy; the Count

for he understood, better than any one else, how to be cautious and careless at the same time, and that is always the safest on slippery ground. At last they say he became a Catholic, and according to the old proverb this would be very possible. Well! God be merciful to his soul! I never could bear him.

From Chambers' Journal.

POEMS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

and even passionate earnestness—proclaiming, in trumpet-notes of no uncertain sound, his loyalty to whatsoever is noble and of good report, and his quick intolerance of wrong. On the capture of certain fugitive slaves near Washington, for instance, his indignation is roused to "see law-shielded ruffians slay the men who fain would win their own," and against those who can look on in apathy, and stifle the sympathies "that make man truly man." In proud protest, he says of himself—

I first drew breath in England's air, and from her Sucked in the tyrant-hating milk that will not let hardy breast

me rest;

And if my words seem treason to the dullard and

the tame,

MR. LOWELL is yet another of the privileged few, among the younger bards of America, who have secured an audience, however small hitherto, on this side the Atlantic. Avowedly a poet of progress, the zeal of his excelsior minstrelsy is perhaps too fervent and vociferous for the taste of some readers; while to others it is his chiefest merit and surest guaranty of welcome. Although he has been described as a hermit, who from the cloister and the cell comes forth into the highways of existence, to speculate on the events of life, and to narrate, for the instruction of the busy multitude, some legend he has learned in seclusion, he is no dreaming solitaire, no mere creature of reverie and dainty sweet" melancholy, but, in good New England sense, and with strong New England emphasis, a practical "work-aday," healthy songster, whose clear voice tells of sound heart and lungs, to which the battle and the breeze of life come nowise Allegiance to the state he is ready to suboramiss. Little patience has he with the self-dinate, therefore, to what he recognizes as absorbed rhymer who lies, from morn the instincts of nature in such a case as this; dewy eve, "with idle elbow on the grass;" good citizenship he refuses to prefer to broad little reverence for the "silken bards" who humanity, exclaiming: 'walk delicately, and only on ground where they need not fear to graze their feet against a stone. His ambition as a poet is to aid in ringing out what our laureate calls "false pride in place and blood," "old shapes of foul disease," "the narrowing lust of gold," "the want, the care, the sin, the faithless coldness of the times." On the political and social questions agitated by his countrymen, he speaks out his convictions with energy

'Tis but my Bay-state dialect-our fathers spake

the same!

neath the sod

Man is more than constitutions; better rot beThan be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God!

Nor can he comprehend those who "hear with quiet pulse of loathsome deeds," such as he here denounces. Them he warns that the slaves of North America are as certainly decreed to liberation from the house of bond

age, as were the Hebrews of yore to their exodus from the land of Egypt; and that if modern slavemasters will be blind to the signs of the times, the passage may be through another Red Sea, "whose surges are of gore."

God works for all. Ye cannot hem the hope of being free

With parallels of latitude, with mountain-range

skies:

ject, as they stand together on the pier, | And lures the earth's dumb spirit up to the longing "looking to where a little craft lay moored, swayed by the lazy current of the Thames." I seem to hear dim whispers and tremulous replies. Hampden urges an exodus from a luxurious The fire-flies o'er the meadow in pulses come land of bondage to that "savage clime where and go; men as yet are free;" while Cromwell is restrained from assent by an inward voice, which says that Freedom has yet a work for him to do at home.

What should we do in that small colony
Of pinched fanatics? . . .

....

Not there, amid the stormy wilderness,
Should we learn wisdom; or, if learnt, what room
To put it into act-else worse than naught?
We learn our souls more, tossing for an hour
Upon this huge and ever-vexed sea

Of human thought, where kingdoms go to wreck
Like fragile bubbles yonder in the stream,
Than in a cycle of New England sloth.*

The following picture of Midnight is a fair specimen of this poet's manner in dealing with such a poet's commonplace:

The moon shines white and silent on the mist, which, like a tide

Of some enchanted ocean, o'er the wide marsh doth glide,

Spreading its ghost-like billows silently far and

wide.

A vague and starry magic makes all things mysteries,

* An evident echo of Tennyson's

The elm trees' heavy shadow weighs on the grass below;

And faintly from the distance the dreaming cock doth crow.

All things look strange and mystic; the very bushes swell,

And take wild shapes and notions, as if beneath a spell

They seem not the same lilacs, from childhood known so well.

The snow of deepest silence o'er every thing doth
fall,

So beautiful and quiet, and yet so like a pall-
As if all life were ended, and rest were come to all.

O wild and wondrous midnight! there is a might

in thee

To make the charmed body almost like spirit be,
And give it some faint glimpses of immortality!

In conclusion, we may remark, that Mr. Lowell's writings in prose, the Biglow Papers, &c., are widely read and highly praised by his fellow-countrymen; but the humor and fancy which characterize them seem to be appreciated by such only as are "native and to the manner born." And considering their

"Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." aim, this is as it should be.

From Dickens's Household Words.

ALWAYS UNITED.

As we grope through the mental gloom of the Dark Ages, stumbling over the lamentable ruins of libraries, and schools, and arts, it is sometimes the good fortune of the student to see, glittering at his feet, a jewel of price and brilliancy-glittering among the crushed and irrecognizable fragments of arts gone by, and the gross and clumsy paraphernalia of a barbarian epoch.

As bright a jewel as ever shone in a century of intellectual darkness and ignorance was a man admired, revered, beloved, hated, followed, celebrated in his own age; and who has been famous to successive ages and to this age almost universally, not for what he had the greatest cause to ground his fame upon-for his learning, his eloquence, or his philosophy-but for being the hero of one of the most romantic love stories the world ever

wept at-for being Abelard, the husband of Heloise.

The story of Abelard and Heloïse, if it be not universally known, is at least universally public. That a thing can be the latter without being the former, I need only call Dr. Johnson (in his criticism on Kenrick) to prove. Every pair of lovers throughout the civilized world have heard of Abelard and Heloïse. They are as familiar in the mouth as Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe, Cupid and Psyche, Darby and Joan, Jobson and Nell. Yet beyond their names, and the fact that they were lovers, not one person in twenty knows much about any of these personages. Every visitor to Paris has seen the Gothic tomb of Abelard and Heloïse in the cemetery of Père la Chaise. Every reader of Pope will remember his exquisite poetical

paraphrase of Heloïse's epistles to Abelard. | Germans-fond as they are of sentimental Every student of the urbane and self-de- metaphysics would have eager y seized vouring Jean Jacques Rousseau has once upon the history of Abelard for elucidation wept and now yawns over the philosophic and disquisition. Yet it will scarcely be sentimentalities of La Nouvelle Heloïse. credited that only three German authors of The names, indeed, of these immortal lovers any note have thought it worth while to write are on the lips of the whole civilized world; at any length about Maître Pierre and his but of the man Abelard and of the woman wife. Herr Moritz Carrière has undertaken Heloise, what they really were like, and what to eliminate Abelard's system of philosophy; they really did and suffered, the knowledge in which he has done little more than transof the vast majority of readers is very limited late the remarks of the most recent French indeed. Their renown has been transmitted writers thereupon. Herr Fessler, in the from century to century with the triple true spirit of a metaphysical littérateur, has consecration of genius, passion, and misfor- taken the subject up in the most orthodox tune; yet their works have been forgotten, style of Fog; descanting, and doubting, and and the history of their lives has become a re-doubting, until the fog becomes positively tradition rather than a chronicle. impervious; and Abelard disappears entirely within it, leaving nothing before the eyes but a hazy mass of black letters sprawling over whitey-brown pages, in a stitched cover of blue sugar-paper. The third sage, Herr Feuerbach, (Leipsic, eighteen hundred and forty-four,) is yet bolder in his metaphysical obscurity. His book is called "Abelard and Heloïse;" but beyond these names dimly impressed on the title-page, the beings they stand for are not once mentioned again throughout the work; and M. de Remusat conjectures that by Abelard and Heloïse, the foggy Herr means Art and Humanity. This is lucus a non lucendo with a vengeance!

It is remarkable, as showing how much of our acquaintance with the subject of this paper-in England, at least-is purely legendary, that in the voluminous catalogue of the library of the British Museum there is but one work to be found in English concerning Abelard and Heloise; and this is but a trumpery imitation of Pope's poetical version of the letters. Scattered through the various biographical dictionaries are sundry meagre notes of Abelard and his spouse. These are all founded upon the only English work of importance on this topic that I have been enabled to meet with, (and the Museum does not possess it :) "The History of the In France, however, to make amends, the lives of Abeillard and Heloïsa, by the Reve- lives and writings of this unhappy pair have rend Joseph Berrington: Basle, seventeen been a fertile theme for the most illustrious of hundred and ninety-three." This is an ex- modern French scholars. The accomplished cellent book, containing, in addition to the Madame Guizot, the academicians Villenave biography, sensible translations of the His- and Philarète-Chasles, the erudite Bibliophile toria calamitatum of Abelard, and of Helo- Jacob, (Paul Lacroix,) have all written well ise's letters; but the good clergyman has on the subject of Maître Peirre. Nor must not thought it worth his while to consult we forget M. Victor Cousin, who in eighteen. the authorities contemporary with his hero hundred and thirty-six first published a work and heroine; and has, in writing their lives, from the pen of Abelard himself, the Sic et taken for granted as historical and authentic non and the Odo Flebiles, or Songs of Laall the romantic figments of a certain clerical mentation of Abelard, from a manuscript rascal, one Dom Gervaise, formerly a Trap- which had been recently discovered in the pist, but who had been drummed out of that Vatican Library. The earliest of the modern austere society; and who, in seventeen writers upon Abelard was the famous and hundred and twenty, published a " History brilliant Bussy-Rabutin; the latest, M. Charles of Peter Abeillard, Abbot of St. Gildas, and de Remusat; who in eighteen hundred and of Eloïsa his wife." This work was interest forty-six published in Paris a voluminous ing and piquant, certainly; but in it the plain and elaborate work entitled Abelard. No; facts of the case were, for purely bookselling not the last. M. de Remusat is but the purposes, overlaid with a farrago of romance penultimate; for even as we write, comes the and legendary gossip. However, Mr. Ber- announcement that the great master of phirington's well-meaning quarto, and the dic-losophical biography, M. Guizot himself, has tionary memoirs founded upon it, together entered the list, and has added his Abelard with Pope and his imitator, are all the to the distinguished catalogue. authorities we can muster on this worldknown theme. One would imagine that the

Yet with all this, the story of the lives of Abelard and Heloïse remains to be written.