Superstition too gave a tinge to poetry.--The Druids had left their foot marks upon the soil, and the ancient rites and feelings cherished in Wales--the last place of refuge for the injured Britons--still held an undefined influence over the hearts of their neighbors. This feeling blazed out for awhile, when the partisans of Henry slew Thomas a-Becket, the "child of love and wonder,"[12] before the altar of St. Bennet. And the murdered Archbishop was doubly canonized, in the holy ritual of Rome, and in the songs of those whom his death had made worshippers. [Footnote 12: Sir J. Mackintosh tells an odd romance of the mother of the celebrated Archbishop, whom he calls the "child of love and wonder."] But the greatest characteristic of the ballad, as used among the Norman successors to the Saxons in England, was a love for the legendary. Britagne--that country lying between the Loire and the Seine, had been peopled by a body of British emigrants about the time of the Saxon invasion under Hengist, and these calling themselves _Armoricans_, settled quietly down in a strange land. They retained many of their old British feelings, and when in the course of time they became nearly amalgamated with their Norman neighbors, and followed them into England, the old love of country revived and they sung of King[13] Arthur and his knights as champions of their forefathers. The strange legends of the early contests between Angles and Britons, were mere clews to the discovery of a thousand others, wholly unfounded in truth, yet none the less palatable to the ignorant. This love of the legendary remains to this day among the descendants of these people, and will, perhaps, never be obliterated. [Footnote 13: "The words _Konung_, _Kyning_, _King_, _Kong_, _Koenig_, and others like them in the Teutonic languages, denoted every sort of command from the highest to that of a very narrow extent. It would be a gross fallacy to understand these words in their modern sense, when we meet them in Anglo-Saxon history."] For the Southern Literary Messenger. MR. WHITE,--I offer a very threadbare excuse for the publication of the following verses. They are published "at the request of a friend," for whom, indeed, they were written. You have accused me of obscurity, and to prevent a repetition of your censure, I will here add a scrap of explanation. "The Last Indian" is something of a Salathiel; he has survived his whole race. Stanza VI, refers to the Aztecs and other tribes long ago extinct, and supposed to have lived once upon a time, among the higher valleys east and west of the Mississippi. A second and more hardy people, referred to in stanza V, perhaps drove the Aztecs, as the Huns drove the Goths, southward, upon the rich regions of Mexico. These dead Mexican tribes are described on their return--led by a kind of _amor patriæ_ instinct--to their early homes in the north.