Loftiest amid the wrecks of ruined empire, Beside the coffin of a headless king! He thrall'd my fate—I have prepared his doom: He made me captive—lo! his narrow cell! [_Advancing to the front of the stage_] So hands unseen do fashion forth the earth Of our frail schemes into our funeral urns; So, walking dream-led in life's sleep, our steps Move blindfold to the scaffold or the throne!— Ay, to the _Throne!_ From that dark thought I strike The light which cheers me onward to my goal. Wild though the night, and angry though the winds, High o'er the billows of the battling sea My Spirit, like a bark, sweeps on to Fortune! MEMOIRS OF MRS. HEMANS.[1] [Footnote 1: From the Memoirs of Mrs. Hemans, by Chorley—now in the press of Messieurs Saunders and Otley, to whom we are indebted for some of the sheets.] It will be yet more clearly seen, from further portions of Mrs. Hemans' correspondence, with what devotion and gratitude she regarded German literature; she spoke of its language as “rich and _affectionate_, in which I take much delight:”—how she gratefully referred to its study as having expanded her mind and opened to her new sources of intellectual delight and exercise. For a while, too, she may have been said to have written under the shadow of its mysticism; but this secondary influence had passed away some time before her death. It is not the lot of high minds, though they may pass through and linger in regions where thought loses itself in obscurity, to terminate their career there. The “Lays of many Lands,” most of which appeared in the New Monthly Magazine, then edited by Mr. Campbell, were, we are told by herself, suggested by Herder's “_Stimmen der Volker in Liedern_.” Her next volume was formed of a collection of these, preceded by “The Forest Sanctuary.”