THE SICILIAN CAPTIVE.

THE Champions had come from their fields of war,
Over the crests of the billows far,

They had brought back the spoils of a hundred shores,
Where the deep had foam'd to their flashing oars.

They sat at their feast round the Norse king's board,
By the glare of the torch-light the mead was pour'd
The hearth was heap'd with the pine-boughs high,
And they flung a red radiance on shields thrown by.

The Scalds had chanted, in Runic rhyme,

Their songs of the sword and the olden time,
And a solemn thrill, as the harp-chords rung,

Had breathed from the walls where the bright spears hung.

But the swell was gone from the quivering string.
They had summon'd a softer voice to sing,

And a captive girl, at the warrior's call,

Stood forth in the midst of that frowning hall.

Lonely she stood-in her mournful eyes
Lay the clear midnight of the southern skies,
And their drooping lids-oh! the world of woe,
The cloud of dreams, that sweet veil below!

Stately she stood-though her fragile frame
Seem'd struck with the blight of some inward flame,
And her proud pale brow had a shade of scorn,
Under the waves of her dark hair worn.

And a deep flush pass'd, like a crimson haze,
O'er her marble cheek, by the pine-fire's blaze;
No soft hue caught from the south-wind's breath,
But a token of fever, at strife with death!

She had been torn from her home away,
With her long locks crown'd for her bridal day,
And brought to die of the burning dreams
That haunt the Exile by foreign streams.

They bade her sing of her distant land

She held its lyre with a trembling hand,

Till the spirit, its blue skies had given her, woke,
And the stream of her voice into music broke.

Faint was the strain in its first wild flow,
Troubled its murmur, and sad and low;
But it swell'd into deeper power ere long,

As the breeze that swept over her soul grew strong.

"They bid me sing of Thee, mine own, my sunny land! of Thee!
Am I not parted from thy shores by the mournful sounding sea?
Doth not thy shadow wrap my soul?-In silence let me die,

In a voiceless dream of thy silvery founts, and thy pure deep sapphire sky
How should thy lyre give here its wealth of buried sweetness forth?
Its tones, of suminer's breathings born, to the wild winds of the North?

"Yet thus it shall be once, once more! my spirit shall awake,
And through the mists of death break out, my Country! for thy sake!
That I may make thee known, with all the glory and the light,
And the beauty never more to bless thy daughter's yearning sight!
Thy woods shall whisper in my song, thy bright streams warble by,
Thy soul flow o'er my lips again-yet once, my Sicily!

"There are blue heavens-far hence, far hence! but oh! their glorious blue! Its very night is beautiful with the hyacinth's deep hue!

It is above my own fair land, and round my laughing home,

And arching o'er the vintage hills, they hang their cloudless dome;
And making all the waves as gems, that melt along the shore,
And steeping happy hearts in joy-that now is mine no more!

"And there are haunts in that green land-oh! who may dream or tell
Of all the shaded loveliness it hides in grot and dell?

By fountains flinging rainbow spray on dark and glossy leaves,
And bowers wherein the forest-dove her nest untroubled weaves;
The myrtle dwells there, sending round the richness of its breath,
And the violets gleam, like amethysts, in the dewy moss beneath!
"And there are floating sounds that fill the skies through night and day,
Sweet sounds! the soul to hear them faints in dreams of heaven away!
They wander through the olive-woods, and o'er the shining seas,
They mingle with the orange scents, that load the sleepy breeze;
Lute, voice, and bird are blending there; it were a bliss to die,
As dies a leaf, thy groves among, my flowery Sicily!

"I may not perish thus-farewell!-yet no, my Country! no!,
Is not Love stronger than the Grave? I feel it must be so!
My fleeting spirit shall o'erpass the mountains and the main,
And in thy tender starlight rove, and through thy woods again!
Its passion deepens-it prevails!-I break my chain-I come
To dwell a viewless thing, yet bless'd, in thy sweet air, my home!"

And her pale arms dropp'd the singing lyre,
There came a mist o'er her wild-eye's fire,
And her dark rich tresses, in many a fold,

Loosed from their braids, down her bosom roll'd.

For her head sank back on the rugged wall,

-A silence fell o'er the warrior's hall!

She had pour'd out her soul with her song's last tone,
The lyre was broken, the minstrel gone!

F. H.

LONDON LETTERS TO COUNTRY COUSINS.-NO. IV.

The King's Bench and its Inmates.

WE will not, my dear Frank, enter this paragon of prisons by the back way adjacent to Belvedere Row, as if we were ashamed of being seen go into it; but will return into the Borough Road, and enter by the principal carriage approach-which, however, leads immediately into the same court-yard as the more private entrance does. This approach resembles all the rest of the exterior of the prison,-which affects an almost puritanical plainness of appearance-disdaining all "foreign aid of ornament," as if conscious of her secret power of holding in captivity all who come within the spell of her charms; or, at least, secure of their returning to her embraces after having once tasted of their sweets. This principal approach to the entrance is flanked on the right by the lofty buttressed wall of which I spoke in my last letter, and is in perfect keeping with it,-consisting, first, of a plain screen of brickwork, with an arched door-way cut in it on each side, for foot passengers, and an open space in the centre for carriage company. This admits you into a plain gravelled avenue, about fifty

yards in length, terminating in a triangular patch of garden on the lett, and, turning abruptly to the right, ushers you into the court-yard, in which the sole actual entrance of the prison opens. This latter consists of a common arched door-way, finished by rusticated stone-work, and reached by half a dozen steps, and on passing which you find yourself in a little hall, scarcely a dozen feet square, but the air and furniture of which at once indicate the sort of domicile into which it leads. It has been suggested, with singular infelicity, that the motto over this door should be

"Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate ;"

which, as you are still a "country gentleman," I must interpret to signify that "those who enter here must leave their hopes behind them," —as old ladies do by their paraboues at the door of a methodist meeting as if a prison were a modern Paraclete,

"Where heavenly pensive contemplation dwells,
And ever-musing melancholy reigns,"

and Hope a kind of clog, the clatter of which would disturb the religious stillness of the place. The motto that actually does figure over the door is a much more sensible one, though it differs from the above in a single word only. It is, being "written in choice Italian,"

"Lasciate ogni cane voi ch'entrate ;"—

or in the vulgate," No dogs admitted.”

While in this little vestibule, you have plenty of time allowed you to study the above, and various other inscriptions touching the amount of fees, &c.; for the functionary whose duty it is to let Christians in and keep dogs out, usually seems in considerable doubt as to which of the two classes any given applicant for admission belongs to, and makes a point of keeping him waiting (or it may be, her,) till, by a most leisurely examination from top to toe, he has fully satisfied himself of the fact. He then, provided there are not fewer than half a dozen persons waiting on either side of the door,-fishes up the huge polished key from the pocket of his white Witney coat, shoots the heavy-sounding bolts of the iron-bound door, and drawing it slowly open, permits the two streams, of entrances and exits, to interpenetrate each other; and the former, if they are paying their first visit, fancy they have gained the scene of their search. But they soon find that, like a boat on a canal in a hilly country, they have only passed one lock to reach another, where they are called upon to pay the same toll over again, of waiting beneath the half scrutinizing, half supercilious eye of the doorkeeper, till a sufficient number of applicants are collected on each side the door to make it worth his while to take the trouble of turning the key. This latter operation, however, introduces you at last into the actual interior of the King's Bench Prison; and whatever may be the hour at which you enter, places before you a living and moving picture, that I will venture to say is unique in its kind.

Let us first take a glance at the frame-work of this picture: not, however, without having, as in the duty of humanity bound, dropped our mite of money into the tin pot held in the extended hand of a

prisoner, who stands in a kind of watch-box close beside the door of entrance on the right, and to whose "attending ears, the unaccustomed softness of the clink sounds

"More silver-sweet than lovers tongues at night;"

and who lifts up his looks from their usual leaden commerce with the ground, to see what manner of person that may be who parts with other coin than mere cumbersome copper, in return for nothing better

than thanks.

If, on passing the above-named sentinel, we are reminded of being within the walls of a prison, it is by nothing but those walls themselves,-which rise to a most ambitious height, and will no more consent to be overlooked than be looked over. They occupy the whole right side of the great open court in which we now stand, but have lost all that character of puritanical plainness which belongs to the outside of them, by being here marked out into compartments, lined, numbered, and otherwise prepared, for the noble game of rackets, which game constitutes the main business and amusement of the inhabitants of the prison. The centre of each of the three compartments into which this part of the wall is divided, is covered with white cement, in the form of an enormous circular mark, or bull's-eye, for the balls to strike against; and this, together with the innumerable small patches of white left by the striking of the chalked balls,—which grow more and more numerous towards the centre point, till they there efface each other and leave nothing but a bright white focus,-produce a very singular effect.

Opposite to this wall is the great continuous and regular building in which the rooms of the prisoners are situated. This consists of a plain face of brick-work, reaching from end to end of the court-leaving, however, a passage round it at either extremity, and its flat face broken in the centre by a portion which projects a foot or so in front of the rest, and forms the chapel. This portion has a pair of plain doors of entrance, and is terminated at top by a pediment; but all the rest of the face is merely pierced into regular ranges of windows, and on the ground-floor into small arches without doors, which serve as entrances to the different galleries into which the whole interior of the building is equally divided.

I do not mean to take you a single step within these entrances; for to say nothing of any such enterprise leading us much too far, and detaining us too long, it would inevitably disturb, if not altogether destroy, that agreeable complacency with which I have determined that we will look on all that may chance to come before us in the course of these Epistles. That complacency encountered considerable danger from the almost tearful gratitude which appeared in the looks of the gentleman (for there was nothing in his mere appearance and manner which might have prevented him from passing for one elsewhere,) who held his hand to us as we entered, aud to whom the unexpected “godsend,” of a shilling instead of a halfpenny, was capable of conveying more pleasure than that other "godsend" which reached us the other day, of certain millions of Austrian gold, has yet done or will do to any one of his Majesty's subjects. Even this sight, which had good for its origin, and pleasure for its end, went nigh to overset my friendly and phi

losophical determination of turning every thing I may send you "to favour and prettiness." What then would be the consequence, if I were to venture within the perilous precincts where it is more than probable that all the careless looks, and it may be forced smiles, which present themselves to our observation here without, are changed into their sad opposites, and the true "secrets of the prison-house" are disclosed?-No:-imprisonment, where one can see the unobstructed light of heaven above us, and feel the fresh air blow upon us as we walk, is a mere word,-striking unpleasantly enough on the ear, and through that reaching to the imagination: but there it stops. The only real prisons are those within the prison. There, indeed, between the four walls of a cell, imprisonment makes itself felt; there, and there only, the word becomes a thing, and enters the very heart and soul. From them, therefore, we will henceforth keep aloof even in thought; forgetting or disbelieving (as we readily may from the scene around us) that in this prison there are any such places.

There is a singular difference between the English and all other civilized nations, in this respect,-that it is impossible for any given number of English people to be domiciliated for any length of time on a particular spot, without each one impressing something of his or her personal character even on the external appearance of the place they inhabit so that, however uniform the character of the place may be in itself, it will never look so if inhabited by English. I pointed out to you something of this in the little garden-plots that front the houses in the Belvedere-row which looks upon the outer walls of this singular spot. But the windows of the prisoners' rooms within the walls offer still more numerous and various illustrations of the remark. The whole face of the building, as I have said, consists of one uniform piece of plain brickwork, pierced by regular ranges of windows, all alike in themselves; and yet, in point of effect, no two out of the whole are alike, and there is scarcely one that does not speak either a history or a prophecy in regard to the inhabitants of it. Those of the lower range, if not the most characteristic in this respect, are the most conspicuous, nearly the whole of them being employed in displaying indications of the particular calling of the occupier; and almost all those callings carried on in what in my part of the world is denominated a chandler's-shop-including, among the thousand and one trades which that comprehensive title takes in, that of an eating-house! Conceive a vendor of "every thing in the world," as Mathews says, including cold boiled beef, " and all that sort of thing,"-exercising his profession in a space of eight feet by eight! Not a very fatiguing exercise, one should think. And conceive of the locale in which such an exercise takes place being called, in letters each half as large as itself, "YORK AND LINCOLN HOUSE!" This reminds me (though I'm sure I don't know why) of a writer who, in seeking to give a familiar illustration of some particular smell, tells us that it recalls to his memory that of a baker's shop at Balsora. Another writes up, "The best shop in the Bench :”—at once with an eye to alliteration, and on the principle of condensation adopted by the Bibliopole who, determining to rival Lackington