She trembles at her footsteps, although their fall is light; For through the turret-loopholes she sees the murky night,— Black, broken vapours streaming across the stormy skies,— Along the empty corridors the moaning tempest cries. She steals along a gallery, she pauses by a door; And fast her tears are dropping down upon the oaken floor; And thrice she seems returning,—but thrice she turns again;— Now heavy lie the cloud of sleep on that old father’s brain! Oh, well it were that _never_ thou should’st waken from thy sleep! For wherefore should they waken who waken but to weep? No more, no more beside thy bed may Peace her vigil keep; Thy sorrow, like a lion, waits[1] upon its prey to leap. II. An afternoon in April. No sun appears on high; A moist and yellow lustre fills the deepness of the sky; And through the castle gateway, with slow and solemn tread, Along the leafless avenue they bear the honoured dead. They stop. The long line closes up, like some gigantic worm; A shape is standing in the path; a wan and ghostlike form; Which gazes fixedly, nor moves; nor utters any sound; Then, like a statue built of snow, falls lifeless to the ground. And though her clothes are ragged, and though her feet are bare; And though all wild and tangled, falls her heavy silk-brown hair; Though from her eyes the brightness, from her cheeks the bloom, has fled; They know their Lady Alice, the Darling of the Dead. With silence, in her own old room the fainting form they lay; Where all things stand unaltered since the night she fled away; But who shall bring to life again her father from the clay? But who shall give her back again her heart of that old day? Footnote 1: The lion was said to ‘prey on nothing that doth seem as dead.’ ILLUSTRATIONS OF CHEAPNESS. A GLOBE. One of the most remarkable of self-educated men, James Ferguson, when a poor agricultural labourer, constructed a globe. A friend had made him a present of ‘Gordon’s Geographical Grammar,’ which, he says, ‘at that time was to me a great treasure. There is no figure of a globe in it, although it contains a tolerable description of the globes, and their use. From this description I made a globe in three weeks, at my father’s, having turned the ball thereof out of a piece of wood; which ball I covered with paper, and delineated a map of the world upon it, made the meridian ring and horizon of wood, covered them with paper, and graduated them; and was happy to find that by my globe (which was the first I ever saw) I could solve the problems.’ ‘But,’ he adds, ‘this was not likely to afford me bread.’