While summer's wind blew soft and low, Seated by gallant Hotspur's side, His Katherine was a happy bride, A thousand years ago. I wandered through the lofty halls From him who once his standard set Glitter the Sultan's crescent moons, That last half-stanza, it has dashed And beasts and borderers throng the way; Men in the coal and cattle line; From Teviot's bard and hero land, From royal Berwick's beach of sand, From Wooller, Morpeth, Hexham, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. These are not the romantic times So dazzling to the dreaming boy; And leave off cattle-stealing: The age of bargaining, said Burke, The Moslem tramples on the Greek, For Greece and fame, for faith and heaven, You'll ask if yet the Percy lives In the armed pomp of feudal state. Of Hotspur and his "gentle Kate," A chambermaid, whose lip and eye, FITZ-GREENE HALLECK. LONDON. COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, 1803. EARTH has not anything to show more fair; WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. NUREMBERG. IN the valley of the Pegnitz, where across broad meadow-lands Rise the blue Franconian mountains, Nuremberg, the ancient, stands. Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of art and song, Memories haunt thy pointed gables like the rooks that round them throng: Memories of the Middle Ages, when the emper- | Through these streets so broad and stately, these ors rough and bold obscure and dismal lanes, Had their dwellings in thy castle, time-defying, Walked of yore the Mastersingers, chanting rude centuries old; poetic strains; And thy brave and thrifty burghers boasted, in From remote and sunless suburbs came they to their uncouth rhyme, the friendly guild, That their great, imperial city stretched its hand Building nests in Fame's great temple, as in to every clime. In the courtyard of the castle, bound with many an iron band, Stands the mighty linden planted by Queen Cunigunde's hand; On the square, the oriel window, where in old heroic days Sat the poet Melchior, singing Kaiser Maximilian's praise. Everywhere I see around me rise the wondrous world of art; Fountains wrought with richest sculpture standing in the common mart; spouts the swallows build. As the weaver plied the shuttle wove he too the mystic rhyme, And the smith his iron measures hammered to the anvil's chime, Thanking God, whose boundless wisdom makes the flowers of poesy bloom In the forge's dust and cinders, in the tissues of the loom. Here Hans Sachs, the cobbler-poet, laureate of the gentle craft, Wisest of the Twelve Wise Masters, in huge folios sang and laughed. And above cathedral doorways saints and bishops But his house is now an alehouse, with a nicely carved in stone, sanded floor, By a former age commissioned as apostles to our And a garland in the window, and his face above own.. the door, Painted by some humble artist, as in Adam Puschman's song, As the old man gray and dovelike, with his great beard white and long. And at night the swart mechanic comes to drown his cark and care, Quaffing ale from pewter tankards, in the master's antique chair. Vanished is the ancient splendor, and before my dreamy eye Wave these mingling shapes and figures, like a faded tapestry. Not thy Councils, not thy Kaisers, win for thee the world's regard, But thy painter, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Sachs, thy cobbler-bard. Thus, O Nuremberg, a wanderer from a region far away, As he paced thy streets and courtyards, sang in thought his careless lay; Gathering from the pavement's crevice, as a floweret of the soil, The nobility of labor, the long pedigree of toil. HENRY W. LONGFELLOW. No track of men, no footsteps to and fro, And gliding up her streets as in a dream, Still glowing with the richest hues of art, Flying away from him whose boast it was Gave birth to Venice. Like the waterfowl, They built their nests among the ocean waves; And where the sands were shifting, as the wind Blew from the north, the south; where they that came Had to make sure the ground they stood upon, A scene of light and glory, a dominion, And whence the talisman by which she rose Towering? 'T was found there in the barren sea. Want led to Enterprise; and, far or near, Thus did Venice rise, |