And now of their dooms dread tidings came, And of torments fierce and dire; And naught she spake--she had ceased to speak-- But her eyes were a soul on fire. But when I told her the bitter end Of the stern and just award, She leaned o'er the bier, and thrice three times She kissed the lips of her lord. And then she said, "My King, they are dead!" And she knelt on the chapel floor, And whispered low with a strange proud smile, "James, James, they suffered more!" Last she stood up to her queenly height, But she shook like an autumn leaf, As though the fire wherein she burned Then left her body, and all were turned To winter of life-long grief. And "O James!" she said, "My James!" she said, "Alas for the woeful thing, That a poet true and a friend of man, In desperate days of bale and ban, Should needs be born a King!" VII LADY JANE GREY "Seventeen--and knew eight languages--in music Peerless--her needle perfect, and her learning Beyond the Churchmen; yet so meek, so modest, So wife-like humble to the trivial boy Mismatched with her for policy! I have heard She would not take a last farewell of him; She feared it might unman him for his end. She could not be unmanned--no, nor outwoman'd. Seventeen--a rose of grace! Girl never breathed to rival such a rose; Rose never blew that equalled such a bud." --TENNYSON. When the hapless daughter of Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, offered up her fair young life upon the scaffold at Tower Hill she was still in her "teens"--with the simplicity and freshness of girlhood upon her. There is a tender and pathetic beauty about the tragic tale which no repetition can wholly dim or wear off. The reader needs not to be told that she was the eldest daughter of Henry Grey, third Marquis of Dorset. She was allied with royal blood, her mother being Frances the eldest daughter of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and Mary Tudor, second daughter of Henry VII. She came also of royal stock on the father's side.