She spoke with an elevated voice, and features glowing with contending passions, till the faithful baron had departed on his mission; but then, then the false strength yielded to despair, and in an agony of unfettered grief she sank into the arms of her attendants, murmuring amid her tears, “O God, how I did adore that man!” and was borne, almost a corpse, into her tent. An hour passed heavily away, and at its close Mary came forth, with a brow from which, though pale as the first dawning, every trace of grief had vanished. The terms had been accepted. Without a tear she saw the man for whom she had sacrificed all--all, to her very reputation--mount and depart for ever! Without a tear she backed her own brave palfrey, and rode, attended by a dozen servitors, faithful amid her sorrows as they had been in brighter days, into the rebel host. Little was there of courtesy, of that demeanor which becomes a subject in presence of his queen, a true knight before a lady. Amid the taunts and jeers of the vile soldiery, covered with dust and humiliation, she entered upon that fatal progress which, commencing in a conditional surrender, ended only when she was immured, beyond a hope of rescue or redemption, within the dungeon-towers of Loch Leven! THE CAPTIVITY. “Long years!--It tries the thrilling frame to bear, And eagle-spirit of a child of song-- Long years of outrage, calumny, and wrong; And the mind’s canker in its savage mood, When the impatient thirst of light and air Scorches the heart; and the abhorred grate, Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade, Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brain With a hot sense of heaviness and pain!”--LAMENT OF TASSO. Eighteen long years of solitary grief--of that most wretched sickness that arises, even to a proverb, from hope too long deferred--had already passed away since, in the fatal action of Langside, the wretched Mary had for the last time seen her banner fall, and her adherents scattered like chaff before the wind by the determined valor of her foes. All, all was lost! It had been the work of months to draw that gallant army to a head, of which so many now lay stark in their curdled gore; while the miserable remnant were hunted like beasts of chase, to perish, when taken, upon the ignominious scaffold. And now, of all the noble gentlemen who had thronged to her bridle-rein on that fatal morning, high in hope as in valor, the merest had escaped to guard the person of that sovereign whom they loved so truly, and in behalf of whom they had endured so deeply. Her crown was lost for ever; nor her crown only, but her country.