We have seen the shadow of this great king pass, through the clouds of sorrow and suffering, into the glory and immortality which still shed their lustre around his memory, after the darkness of nearly a thousand winters has gathered and passed over his grave. Even the gloomy gates of death could not extinguish, in the volumed blackness they enclose, the trailing splendour which accompanied his setting, without leaving behind a summer twilight, over a land where before there was nothing but darkness to mark the departing day. Upon a sky dim, and unsprinkled with the golden letters of light, Alfred first rose, the evening star of English history. From his first appearance a brightness marked his course; even in the morning of life, he "flamed upon the forehead of the sky." Instead of the dull, cold, leaden grey, which announced the appearance of other kings, his crowned head broke the stormy rack, in a true splendour that befitted such majesty, and though dimmed for awhile, every observant eye could see that it was the sun which hung behind the clouds. In childhood, long before his step-mother, Judith, had taught him to read, his chief delight was in committing to memory the poems which the Saxon bards chaunted in his father's court; and who can doubt but that many a wandering minstrel descended from the ancient Cymry, struck his harp within the Saxon halls, and made the boyish heart of Alfred thrill again, as he heard the praises of those early British heroes sung, whose bare breasts and sharp swords were the bold bulwarks that so long withstood the mailed legions which the haughty emperor of Rome had sent, swarming over our own island shores. In this rude school was Alfred first taught that the names of the good, the great, and the brave can never die; that valour and virtue were immortal; and he resolved to emulate the deeds of those whose memories time can never obliterate; by whose names we number the footsteps of eternity, when marble and monumental brass have crumbled into dust. It was at the Castaly of the Muses, which then but trickled from a rude, grey Saxon font, where Alfred first drank in the draught that gave him immortality. Eager for knowledge, he looked around in vain for any one to instruct him; he had not a clergyman about him who could translate the prayers he read in Latin, into Saxon; until poor old Asser came from Wales, he could not find in his whole court a scholar equal to himself. His nobles could hunt and fight; his brothers could do no more: they lived and died, and their names would never have been remembered had they not chanced to have been kings. The mind of Alfred was fashioned in another mould; accident had made him a king, and he resolved to become a man, to think and act worthy of a being who bore on his brow God's image--to be something more than the mere heir to a hollow crown and the lands of Wessex; so he threw aside his sword, which he knew a thousand arms could wield as well as his own, and took