O’er a low couch the setting sun
Had thrown its latest ray,
Where in his last strong agony
A dying warrior lay,—
The stern old Baron Rudiger,
Whose frame had ne’er been bent
By wasting pain, till time and toil
Its iron strength had spent.
“They come around me here, and say
My days of life are o’er,
That...
There came a man, making his hasty moan
Before the Sultan Mahmoud on his throne,
And crying out, “My sorrow is my right,
And I will see the Sultan, and to-night.”
“Sorrow,” said Mahmoud, “is a reverend thing:
I recognize its right, as king with king;
Speak on.” “A fiend has got into my house,”
Exclaimed the staring man, “and tortures us...
It was a Moorish maiden was sitting by a well,
And what that maiden thought of, I cannot, cannot tell,
When by there rode a valiant knight, from the town of Oviedo—
Alphonso Guzman was he hight, the Count of Desparedo.
“O maiden, Moorish maiden! why sitt’st thou by the spring?
Say, dost thou seek a lover, or any other thing?
Why gazest thou...
From the Provençal by Harriet Waters Preston
From “Calendau”
AT Arles in the Carlovingian days,
By the swift Rhone water,
A hundred thousand on either side,
Christian and Saracen, fought till the tide
Ran red with the slaughter.
May God forefend such another flood
Of direful war!
The Count of...
King Francis was a hearty king, and loved a royal sport,
And one day, as his lions fought, sat looking on the court.
The nobles filled the benches, with the ladies in their pride,
And ’mongst them sat the Count de Lorge, with one for whom he sighed:
And truly ’t was a gallant thing to see that crowning show,
Valor and love, and a king above, and the...
(Peter Ronsard loquitur)
“HEIGHO,” yawned one day King Francis,
“Distance all value enhances!
When a man’s busy, why, leisure
Strikes him as wonderful pleasure—
’Faith, and at leisure once is he?
Straightway he wants to be busy.
Here we ’ve got peace; and aghast I ’m
Caught thinking war the true pastime!
Is there a reason...
The King with all his kingly train
Had left his Pompadour behind,
And forth he rode in Senart’s wood
The royal beasts of chase to find.
That day by chance the Monarch mused,
And turning suddenly away,
He struck alone into a path
That far from crowds and courtiers lay.
He saw the pale green shadows play
Upon the brown...
On the sea and at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety-two,
Did the English fight the French—woe to France!
And the thirty-first of May, helter-skelter through the blue,
Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks pursue,
Came crowding ship on ship to St. Malo on the Rance,
With the English fleet in view.
’T was the squadron that...
I Sprang to the stirrup, and Joris and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;
“Good speed!” cried the watch as the gatebolts undrew,
“Speed!” echoed the wall to us galloping through.
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest;
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace,—...
It was upon an April morn,
While yet the frost lay hoar,
We heard Lord James’s bugle-horn
Sound by the rocky shore.
Then down we went, a hundred knights,
All in our dark array,
And flung our armor in the ships
That rode within the bay.
We spoke not as the shore grew less,
But gazed in silence back,
...
