WAR SONG. THE original strain, of which the following stanzas are an imitation, was wont to be sung, with patriotic enthusiasm, by the German and Prussian soldiers, in their encampments, on their marches, and in the field of battle, during the last campaigns of the allies against Bonaparte. This Tyrtean lyric, therefore, contributed, in its day and its degree, to the deliverance of Europe. Quelque part que je me tourne, En quelque lieu que je soye Si pres des fleuves j'arrive Si quelque amy d'aventure, Unto whatever part I turn, Sorrow with me abides; A deadly sound is in mine ears, The self-same sound pursueth still, Whatever house I enter in, And if the people's haunts I shun, The owl shrieks out in witness to If to the river side I go, And stand upon the brink; The bird upon the dry thorn sits, If any friend perchance do come To comfort me; he straightway feels A carking care, a woe extreme, This is natural and pathetic. Jan de la Peruse, from the few poems he has left, seems to have been an amiable man, warmly attached to his friends, and not very solicitous to court the notice of the powerful. I have learnt nothing more concerning him, than that he was born at Angoulême, and died there in 1555, in the prime of his life. The Twelve Tales of Lyddalcross. TALE THE FIFTH. THE MOTHER'S DREAM. She slept and there was vision'd to her eye A form that seiz'd her-blow, and shriek, and shout The Fifth Tale was related by a lady. Her voice was slow and gentle, and possessed that devotional Scottish melody of expression which gives so much antique richness and grace to speech. Under the shade of a long veil she sought to conceal a face where early grief had bleached the roses, and impressed a sedate and settled sorrow on a brow particularly white and high. But her eye still retained something of the light of early life, which darkened or brightened as the joys, the sufferings, or the sorrows, of wedded and maternal love, gave a deeper interest or passion to her story. When woman is young, said she, with a sigh, but not of regret, she loves to walk in the crowded streets, and near the dwellings of menwhen she becomes wiser, has seen the vanities, and drunk of the miseries and woes of life, she chooses her walks in more lonely places, and, seeking converse with her own spirit, Legend of Ladye Beatrice. shuns the joy and the mirth of the world. When sorrow, which misses few, had found me out, and made me a mateless bird, I once walked out to the margin of that beautiful sheet of water, the Ladye's Lowe. It was the heart of summer; the hills in which the lake lay embosomed were bright and green; sheep were scattered upon their sides; shepherds sat on their summits; while the grassy sward, descending to the quiet pure water, gave it so much of its own vernal hue, that the eye could not always distinguish where the land and lake met. Its long green water flags, and broad lilies, which lay so flat and so white along the surface, were unmoved, save by the course of a pair of wild swans, which for many years had grazed on the grassy margin, or found food in the bottom of the lake. This pastoral quietness pertained more to modern than to ancient times. When the summer heat was high, and the waters of the lake low, the remains of a broken but narrow causeway, composed of square stones, indented in a frame-work of massy oak, might still be traced, starting from a little bay on the northern side, and diving directly towards the centre of the lake. Tradition, in pursuing the history of this causeway, supplied the lake with an island, the island with a tower, and the tower with narratives of perils, and bloodshed, and chivalry, and love. These fireside traditions, varying according to the fancy of the peasantry, all concluded in a story too wild for ordinary belief. A battle is invariably described by some grey-headed narrator, fought on the southern side of the lake, and sufficiently perilous and bloody. A lady's voice is heard, and a lady's form is seen, among the armed men, in the middle of the fight. She is described as borne off towards the causeway by the lord of the tower, while the margin of the water is strewed with dead or dying men. She sees her father, her brother, fall in her defence; her lover, to whom she had been betrothed, and from whom she had been torn, die by her side; and the deep and lasting curse which she denounced against her ravisher, and the tower, and the lake which gave him shelter, is not forgotten, but it is too awful to mingle with the stories of a grave and a devout people. That night, it is said, a voice was heard as of a spirit running round and round the lake, and pronouncing a curse against it; the waters became agitated, and a shriek was heard at midnight. In the morning the castle of the Ladye's Lowe was sunk, and the waters of the lake slept seven fathoms deep over the copestone. They who attach credence to this wild legend are willing to support it by much curious testimony. They tell that, when the waters are pure in summer time, or when the winter's ice lies clear beneath the foot of the curler, the wails of the tower are distinctly seen without a stone displaced; while those who connect tales of wonder with every remarkable place, say, that once a year the castle arises at midnight from the bosom of the lake, with lights, not like the lights of this world, streaming from loophole and turret, while on the summit, like a banner spread, stands a lady clad in white, holding her hands to heaven, and shrieking. This vision is said to precede, by a night or two, the annual destruction of some person by the waters of the lake. The influence of this superstition has made the Ladye's Lowe a solitary and a desolate place, has preserved its fish, which are both delicious and numerous, from the fisher's net and hook, and its wild swans from the gun of the fowler. The peasantry seldom seek the solitude of its beautiful banks, and avoid bathing in its waters; and when the winter gives its bosom to the curler or the skater, old men look grave and say, 'The Ladye's Lowe will have its yearly victim; and its yearly victim, tradition tells us, it has ever had since the sinking of the tower. I had reached the margin of the lake, and sat looking on its wide pure expanse of water. Here and there the remains of an old tree, or a stunted hawthorn, broke and beautified the winding line of its border; while cattle, coming to drink and gaze at their shadows, took away from the awe and solitude of the place. As my eye pursued the sinuous outline of the lake, it was arrested by the appearance of a form, which seemed that of a human being, stretched motionless on the margin. I rose, and, on going nearer, I saw it was a man; the face cast upon the earth, and the hands spread. I thought death had been there; and while I was waving my hand for a shepherd, who sat on the hill-side, to approach and assist me, I heard a groan, and a low and melancholy cry; and presently he started up, and, seating himself on an old tree-root, rested a cheek on the palm of either hand, and gazed intently on the lake. He was a young man; the remains of health and beauty were still about him; but his locks, once curling and long, which maidens loved to look at, were now matted, and wild, and withered; his cheeks were hollow and pale, and his eyes, once the merriest and brightest in the district, shone now with a grey, wild, and unearthly light. As I looked upon this melancholy wreck of youth and strength, the unhappy being put both hands in the lake, and lifting Cursed may'st thou continue, for my sake, For the mother who wail'd for her child. The sound of the song rolled low and melancholy over the surface of the lake. I never heard a sound so dismal. During the third verse, the singer took up water in the hollow of his hand, and threw it on the wind. Then he threw a pebble and a feather into the lake; and, gathering up the dust among the margin stones, strewed it over the surface of the water. When he concluded his wild verses, he uttered a loud cry, and, throwing himself suddenly on his face, spread out his hands, and lay, and quivered, and moaned like one in mortal agony. A young woman, in widow's weeds, and with a face still deeper in woe than her mourning dress, now came towards me, along the border of the lake. She had the face and the form of one whom I knew in my youth, the companion of my teens, and the life and love of all who had hearts worth a woman's wish. She was the grace of the preaching, the joy of the dance, through her native valley, and had the kindest and the gayest heart in the wide holms of Annandale. I rode at her wedding, and a gay woman was I; I danced at her wedding as if sorrow was never to come; and when I went to the kirking, and saw her so fair, and her husband so handsome, I said, in the simplicity of my |