Burst upon his ears one swell! it seemed an anthem of the spheres, Jubilant, divinely ringing; swam his eyes with happy tears-- "Come, forgiven one," the cadence, "chastened spirit, come, arise From thine earthly prison-house to holy homes beyond the skies." Fainter, fainter, still more feeble, grew the sufferer as he heard, And a sigh swooned on the silence, soft as breathing of a bird,-- And all was over. In his trance his spirit's sparkling feet had trod The realms of space, and gone from earth, through air, to judgment and to God. NOTES. The judgment of the _peine forte et dure_, on an instance of which our ballad is founded, was well known in the ancient law of England. As has been seen, it was terribly severe. The circumstances of the judgment were as follows: When a prisoner stood charged with an offence, and an indictment had been found against him, before he could be tried he was called upon to answer, or, in technical parlance, to plead. A plea in bar is an answer, either affirming or denying the offence charged in the indictment, or, if of a dilatory character, showing some ground why the defendant should not be called upon to answer at all. In those days, in all capital cases, the estates of the criminal, on conviction and judgment, were forfeited to the crown. The blood of the offender was considered as corrupted, and, as a consequence, his property could not pass to his family, who, although innocent, suffered for the faults of the criminal. Crimes, therefore, where the punishment fell, not only on the criminal but on his family, were comparatively of rare occurrence. An admission of guilt produced the same effect as a conviction. If the defendant, however, stood mute, obstinately refusing to answer, by which behaviour he preserved his estates to his family, he was sentenced to undergo the judgment of the _peine forte et dure_. "The English judgment of penance for standing mute," says Chief Justice Blackstone, in his admirable Commentaries, "was as follows: That the prisoner be remanded to the prison from whence he came, and put into a low, dark chamber; and there be laid on his back, naked, unless where decency forbids: that there be placed upon his body as great a weight of iron as he could bear and more; that he have no sustenance, save only on the first day, three morsels of the worst bread; and, on the second day, three draughts of standing water, that should be nearest to the prison door; and in this situation this should be alternately his daily diet _till he died_, or (as anciently the judgement ran) _till he answered_."