Snows incarnadined were thine, O Eylau, field of the wide white spaces, And frozen lakes, and frozen limbs, and blood iced hard as it left the veins: Steel-cased squadrons swathed in cloud-drift, plunging to doom through pathless places, And forty thousand dead and near dead, strewing the early-lighted plains. Friedland to these adds its tale of victims, its midnight marches and hot collisions, Its plunge, at his word, on the enemy hooped by the bended river and famed Mill stream, As he shatters the moves of the loose-knit nations to curb his exploitful soul's ambitions, And their great Confederacy dissolves like the diorama of a dream. DUMB SHOW [continues] NAPOLEON and ALEXANDER emerge from their seclusion, and each is beheld talking to the suite of his companion apparently in flattering compliment. An effusive parting, which signifies itself to be but temporary, is followed by their return to the river shores amid the cheers of the spectators. NAPOLEON and his marshals arrive at the door of his quarters and enter, and pass out of sight to other rooms than that of the foreground in which the observers are loitering. Dumb show ends. [A murmured conversation grows audible, carried on by two persons in the crowd beneath the open windows. Their dress being the native one, and their tongue unfamiliar, they seem to the officers to be merely inhabitants gossiping; and their voices continue unheeded.] FIRST ENGLISH SPY[14] [below] Did you get much for me to send on? SECOND ENGLISH SPY Much; and startling, too. “Why are we at war?” says Napoleon when they met.--“Ah--why!” said t'other.--“Well,” said Boney, “I am fighting you only as an ally of the English, and you are simply serving them, and not yourself, in fighting me.”--“In that case,” says Alexander, “we shall soon be friends, for I owe her as great a grudge as you.” FIRST SPY Dammy, go that length, did they! SECOND SPY Then they plunged into the old story about English selfishness, and greed, and duplicity. But the climax related to Spain, and it amounted to this: they agreed that the Bourbons of the Spanish throne should be made to abdicate, and Bonaparte's relations set up as sovereigns instead of them. FIRST SPY Somebody must ride like hell to let our Cabinet know! SECOND SPY I have written it down in cipher, not to trust to memory, and to guard against accidents.--They also agree that France should have the Pope's dominions, Malta, and Egypt; that Napoleon's brother Joseph should have Sicily as well as Naples, and that they would partition the Ottoman Empire between them. FIRST SPY Cutting up Europe like a plum-pudding. Par nobile fratrum! SECOND SPY