But Dorchester is thine no more, its gallant pulse is still, The wild cat prowls among its graves and screams the whippoorwill, A mournful spell is on its homes, where solitude, supreme, Still, coaching in her tangled woods, dreams one unbroken dream: The cotter seeks a foreign home,—the cottage roof is down, The ivy clambers all uncheck’d above the steeple’s crown; And doubly gray, with grief and years, the old church tott’ring stands, Ah! how unlike that holy home not built with human hands! These ruins have their story, and, with a reverent fear, I glide beneath the broken arch and through the passage drear; The hillock at my feet grows warm—beneath it beats a heart Whose pulses wake to utterance, whose accents make me start; That heart hath beat in battle, when the thunder-cloud was high, And death, in every form of fate, careering through the sky; Beside it now, another heart, in peace but lately known, Beats with a kindred pulse, but hath a story of its own. Ah! sad the fate of maiden whose lover falls in fight, Condemned to bear, in widowhood, the lonely length of light;— The days that come without a sun, the nights that bring no sleep; The long, long watch, the weariness, the same, sad toil—to weep! Methinks, the call is happiness, when sudden sounds the strain That summons back the exiled heart of love to heaven again;— No trumpet-tone of battle, but a soft note sweetly clear, Like that which even now is heard when doves are wooing near. * * * * * THE TWO DUKES. BY ANN S. STEPHENS. One church and three dwelling houses, occupied by bishops, had already been torn down to supply material for the magnificent palace which the Duke of Somerset was erecting for himself in the Strand,—a sacrilege which the populace were beginning to feel and resent, in a manner which threatened some disturbance to the public peace. A rumor went abroad that the Duke’s workmen had received his commands to repair to Westminster on a certain day, in order to pull down the Church of St. Margaret’s, and add its materials to those already so boldly wrested from their sacred purposes.