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Is not this death? Our boy, they tore me from him:
Buried they him?

AYL.

Alas, I know not. [She faints.] Faint not!

'Tis I-'tis Aylmere holds thee, Mariamne!

MAR. I see thee not, nor hear thee.-Bless thee! Bless thee!

[Dies.]

AYL. Look up, love! Wife! My Mariamne! Cold!

Dead! dead! [Weeps.]

[He rises-sinks again-is caught and supported.]

Why should I weep? Go I not with her?

Is Atlas' burthen on me? Say struck home!
The charter-is it come?

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Say hath slain all! I come, my Mariamne! [He sinks upon her body. A distant shout.

Another and nearer.

AYLMERE partly

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["A cry without, “The charter ! the charter!" MOWBRAY rushes in, bearing the charter,

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[AYLMERE starts up with a wild burst of exultation, rushes to him, catches the charter, kisses it, and clasps it to his bosom.]

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Robert Hinckley Messinger.

BORN in Boston, Mass., 1811. DIED at Stamford, Conn., 1874.

A WINTER WISH.

[First printed in the "New York American," 26 April, 1838.]

Old wine to drink, old wood to burn, old books to read, and old friends to converse with.-Alfonso of Castile.

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And ripened 'neath the blink
Of India's sun!

Peat whiskey hot,

Tempered with well-boiled water!
These make the long night shorter,-
Forgetting not

Good stout old English porter.

Old wood to burn!

Ay, bring the hill-side beech

From where the owlets meet and screech, And ravens croak;

The crackling pine, and cedar sweet;

Bring too a clump of fragrant peat,
Dug 'neath the fern;
The knotted oak,

A fagot too, perhap,

Whose bright flame, dancing, winking,

Shall light us at our drinking;

While the oozing sap

Shall make sweet music to our thinking.

Old books to read!

Ay, bring those nodes of wit,

The brazen-clasped, the vellum writ,
Time-honored tomes!

The same my sire scanned before,
The same my grandsire thumbed o'er,
The same his sire from college bore,

The well-earned meed

Of Oxford's domes:
Old Homer blind,

Old Horace, rake Anacreon, by
Old Tully, Plautus, Terence lie;
Mort Arthur's olden minstrelsie,

Quaint Burton, quainter Spenser, ay!
And Gervase Markham's venerie-

Nor leave behind

The holye Book by which we live and die.

Old friends to talk!

Ay, bring those chosen few,

The wise, the courtly, and the true,

So rarely found;

Him for my wine, him for my stud,

Him for my easel, distich, bud

In mountain walk!

Bring Walter good,

With soulful Fred, and learned Will,
And thee, my alter ego (dearer still

For every mood).

These add a bouquet to my wine!
These add a sparkle to my pine!

If these I tine,

Can books, or fire, or wine be good?

Wendell Phillips.

BORN in Boston, Mass., 1811. DIED there, 1884.

THE WISDOM OF ANCIENT DAYS.

[From his Lecture on "The Lost Arts." First delivered in 1838-39.-The Lost Arts. 1884.]

TAKE

AKE the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty, or form, we are borrowers.

You may glance around the furniture of the palaces in Europe, and you may gather all these utensils of art or use; and, when you have fixed the shape and forms in your mind, I will take you into the museum of Naples, which gathers all remains of the domestic life of the Romans, and you shall not find a single one of these modern forms of art or beauty or use that was not anticipated there. We have hardly added one single line or sweep of beauty to the antique.

Take the stories of Shakespeare, who has, perhaps, written his fortyodd plays. Some are historical. The rest, two-thirds of them, he did not stop to invent, but he found them. These he clutched, ready made to his hand, from the Italian novelists, who had taken them before from the East. Cinderella and her slipper is older than all history, like half a dozen other baby legends. The annals of the world do not go back far enough to tell us from where they first came.

All the boys' plays, like everything that amuses the child in the open air, are Asiatic. Rawlinson will show you that they came somewhere from the banks of the Ganges or the suburbs of Damascus. Bulwer borrowed the incidents of his Roman stories from legends of a thousand years before. Indeed, Dunlop, who has grouped the history of the novels of all Europe into one essay, says that in the nations of modern Europe there have been two hundred and fifty or three hundred distinct stories. He says at least two hundred of these may be traced, before Christianity, to the other side of the Black Sea. If this were my topic, which it is not, I might tell you that even our newspaper jokes are enjoying a very respectable old age. Take Maria Edgeworth's essay on Irish bulls and the laughable mistakes of the Irish. Even the tale which

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