The winnowing store, and claim the little boon
Which Providence assigns them. One alone,
The redbreast, sacred to the household gods,
Wisely regardful of the embroiling2 sky,
In joyless fields and thorny thickets leaves
His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man
His annual visit. Half-afraid, he first
Against the window beats; then, brisk, alights
On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor,
Eyes all the smiling family askance,3

And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is,
Till more familiar grown, the table crumbs
Attract his slender feet.4 The foodless wilds
Pour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare,
Though timorous of heart, and hard beset
By death in various forms, dark snares, and dogs,
And more-unpitying men, the garden seeks,
Urged on by fearless want. The bleating kine
Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glist'ning earth,
With looks of dumb despair; then, sad dispersed,
Dig for the withered herb through heaps of snow.

As thus the snows arise, and foul and fierce
All winter drives along the darkened air,
In his own loose-revolving fields the swain
Disastered stands; sees other hills ascend
Of unknown joyless brow, and other scenes
Of horrid prospect shag the trackless plain;
Nor finds the river nor the forest, hid
Beneath the formless wild; but wanders on
From hill to dale, still more and more astray,
Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps,

2 Em-broil'-ing, being in a state of confusion, from the hurtling showers of snow-flakes that are falling and whirling in eddying masses through the air. From the French embrouiller, to confound, or throw into confusion; hence our word "broil," a noisy quarrel.

3 As-kance, or As-kant, in an oblique direction, not straight in front. From the Italian schiancio, awry, allied to the Greek σxalos (ski'-os) and the Latin scavus, on the left hand, oblique.

4 The robin's legs are thicker and clumsier in proportion than those of many other birds, for which reason in the West country the bird is sometimes called "posty-legs."

Stung with the thoughts of home; the thoughts of home
Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour forth
In many a vain attempt. How sinks his soul !
What black despair, what horror fills his heart!
When for the dusky spot which fancy feigned
His tufted cottage rising through the snow,
He meets the roughness of the middle waste,
Far from the track and blessed abode of man;
While round him night resistless closes fast,
And every tempest howling o'er his head,
Renders the savage wilderness more wild.
Then throng the busy shapes into his mind
Of covered pits, unfathomably deep,

A dire descent! beyond the power of frost ;
Of faithless bogs; of precipices huge

Smoothed up with snow; and what is land unknown,
What water of the still unfrozen spring,

In the loose marsh or solitary lake,

Where the fresh fountain from the bottom boils..
These check his fearful steps, and down he sinks
Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift,
Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death,
Mixed with the tender anguish nature shoots
Through the wrung bosom of the dying man,
His wife, his children, and his friends unseen.
In vain for him the officious 5 wife prepares
The fire fair blazing, and the vestment warm:
In vain his little children, peeping out
Into the mingling storm, demand their sire
With tears of artless innocence. Alas!
Nor wife nor children more shall he behold,
Nor friends, nor sacred home. On every nerve
The deadly winter seizes, shuts up sense,
And o'er his inmost vitals creeping cold,
Lays him along the snows a stiffened corse,

Stretched out, and bleaching 'neath the northern blast.

5 Offic-ious, dutiful, intermeddling. From the Latin officium, duty. Here the word is used in its primary and less common sense of cheerful and earnest performance of duty, and not in its general acceptation of being overbusy and meddlesome; those who are fond of having a finger in every pie generally bringing duty to the front, as an excuse for interference.

MARSTON MOOR.

WINTHROP MACKWORTH PRAED,

A talented English scholar and pleasing poet, whose early productions showed promise of a brilliant future, which without doubt would have been amply realized had he not died long before he had reached the prime of life. He was born in 1802, and was educated at Eton and Cambridge. When at Eton, he became acquainted with Mr. Charles Knight, who subsequently raised himself to eminence, as a publisher and author, and when there, and in after-life, contributed to some of his earlier publications. He entered the House of Commons in 1830, and offered an uncompromising opposition to the Reform Bill of that period. He died in 1839.

[Praed's poem of "Marston Moor," written in a metre which was used by Lord Macaulay for many of his most spirited effusions, is an excellent delineation of a kind of episode that must have been common enough in the Civil War, between Charles I. and the Parliament, and the spirit that animated the reckless and chivalrous followers of the King, on one side, and the resolute but too frequently sour-minded men who formed the adherents of the Parliament, on the other. The story of the strife that cost England much of her best and noblest blood on both sides in the seventeenth century, has been told too often to need recapitulation here, but a sketch of the opposing armies as they confronted each other on the field of Marston Moor, from the pen of a writer who belonged to a family of scholarly poets and prose writers, may not be out of place.

"Fifty thousand subjects of one king stood face to face on Marston Moor. The numbers on each side were not far unequal, but never were two hosts speaking one language of more dissimilar aspects. The Cavaliers, flushed with recent victory,2 identifying their quarrel with their honour and their love, their loose locks escaping beneath their plumed helmets, glittering in all the

I Hartley Coleridge, the eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the author of "Essays," "Marginalia," and the "Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire." His brother, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, has edited an edition of the collected poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed.

2 Four days previously the Cavaliers under Sir William Waller had defeated the troops of the Parliament, at Cropredy Bridge, near Banbury in Oxfordshire, and the result of the conflicts generally that had taken place had been in favour of the king.

martial pride which makes the battle-day like a pageant or a festival, and prancing forth with all the grace of gentle love, as they would make a jest of death, while the spirit-rousing strains of the trumpets made their blood dance and their steeds prick up their ears; the Roundheads 3 arranged in thick dark masses, their steel caps and high-crowned hats drawn close over their brows, looking determination, expressing with furrowed foreheads and hard closed lips, the inly-working rage, which was blown up to furnace-heat by the extempore effusions of their preachers, and found vent in the terrible denunciations of the Hebrew psalms and prophecies. The arms of each party were adapted to the nature of their courage; the swords, pikes, and pistols of the Royalists, light and bright, were suited for swift onset and ready use; while the ponderous basket-hilted blades, long halberts, and heavy fire-arms of the Parliamentarians were equally suited to resist a sharp attack and to do execution upon a broken enemy. The Royalists regarded their adversaries with that scorn, which the gay and high-born always feel or affect for the precise or sour-mannered; the soldiers of the covenant looked on their enemies as the enemies of Israel, and considered themselves as the elect and chosen people, a creed which extinguished fear and remorse together. It would be hard to say whether there was more praying on one side, or more swearing on the other, or which to a truly Christian ear had been the most offensive. Yet both esteemed themselves the champions of the Church: there was bravery and virtue in both, but with this high advantage on the Parliamentary side-that while the aristocratic honour of the Royalists could only inspire a certain number of gentlemen, and separated the patrician from the plebeian soldier, the religious zeal of the Puritans bound officer and

3 The origin of the term Roundhead is found in the close-clipped hair of the supporters of the Parliament, who used this means to distinguish themselves from the Cavaliers, who wore their hair long and reaching to the shoulders, but it is not generally known on what occasion it was first used. The following passage from Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of England" shows that Henrietta Maria, the queen of Charles I., was the first to use the name by which the Puritans were soon commonly designated. "Samuel Barnardiston, a noted republican, was in his youth the leader of a deputation of London apprentices, for the purpose of communicating to parliament their notions regarding civil and religious government. The queen, who saw this posse arrive at Whitehall, then first noticed the extraordinary roundness of their closely-clipped heads, and saw at the same time that Samuel was a personable apprentice; upon which she exclaimed, 'La! what a handsome young roundhead!' The exactness of the descriptive appellation fixed it at once as a party name; Roundheads they were called from that moment, and Roundheads they will remain while history endures."

man, general and pioneer together, in a fierce and resolute sympathy, and made equality itself an argument for subordination. The captain prayed at the head of his company, and the general's oration was a sermon."

So stood the troops of the King and the Parliament opposite each other on Marston Moor, on the evening of July 2, 1644, and such was the spirit in which they stood awaiting the signal to begin the fray. The Royalists were commanded by Prince Rupert and the Marquis of Newcastle, who had determined to make an effort to raise the siege of York, then closely besieged by a combined army of Scotch and Parliament soldiers; the Roundheads were led by Cromwell and Fairfax. Newcastle drove Fairfax back, while Cromwell sent Rupert and his horsemen in disorder from the field. Then wheeling round, the future Protector fell on Newcastle's rear, and enabled Fairfax to rally his flying troops. The remnant of the king's army under Newcastle were thus crushed between two fires, and a victory was won from the dire effects of which the king's party never recovered.]

To horse! to horse! Sir Nicholas, the clarion's note is high!

To horse! to horse! Sir Nicholas, the big drum makes reply.

Ere this has Lucas marched with his gallant cavaliers, And the bray of Rupert's5 trumpets grows fainter in our

ears.

To horse! to horse! Sir Nicholas! White Guy is at the door

And the raven whets his beak o'er the field of Marston Moor.

Uprose the Lady Alice from her brief and broken prayer, And she brought a silken banner down the narrow turret

stair;

4 Sir Charles Lucas, shot in cold blood by order of parliamentary courtmartial, with Sir George Lisle, after the siege of Colchester, in 1648, after they had surrendered on condition of their lives being spared.

5 Prince Rupert, who with his brother Prince Maurice played a conspicuous part in the Civil War. They were the nephews of Charles I., being the sons of his sister Elizabeth, who married Frederick, the unfortunate Elector Palatine of the Rhine. He was born in 1619, and died in 1682. He was the first governor of the Hudson Bay Company, and the territory called Rupert's Land in British North America takes its name from him.