6. She neither screamed nor stirred, but her sufferings were too sadly testified by the convulsion of her features, when, after the third blow, the butcherwork was accomplished, and the severed head, streaming with blood, was held up to the gaze of the people. "God save Queen Elizabeth!" cried the executioner. "So let all her enemies perish !" exclaimed the Dean of Peterborough. One solitary voice alone responded "Amen!"—it was that of the Earl of Kent. The silence the tears, and groans of the witnesses of the tragedy, yea, even of the very assistants in it, proclaimed the feelings with which it had been regarded.

7. Mary's weeping ladies now approached and besought the executioners "not to strip the corpse of their beloved mistress, but to permit her faithful servants to fulfil her last request, by covering it as modesty required, and removing it to her bedchamber, where themselves and her other ladies would perform the last duties." But they were rudely repulsed, hurried out of the hall, and locked into a chamber while the executioners, intent only on securing what they considered their perquisites, began, with ruffian hands, to despoil the still warm and palpitating remains.

8. One faithful attendant, however, lingered, and refused to be thrust away. Mary's little Skye terrier had followed her to the scaffold unnoticed, had crept closer to her when she laid her head on the block, and was found crouching under her garments, saturated with her blood. It was only by violence he could be removed, and then he went and lay between her head and body, moaning piteously.

9. Some barbarous fanatic, desiring to force a verificatio of Knox's favorite comparison between this unfortunate prin cess and Jezebel, tried to tempt the dog to lap the blood of his royal mistress; but, with intelligence beyond that of his species, the sagacious creature refused; nor could he be induced to partake of food again, but pined himself to death.

10. The head was exposed on a black velvet cushion to the view of the populace in the court-yard for an hour, from the large window in the hall. No feeling but that of sympathy for her and indignation against her murderers was elicited by

this woful spectacle. The remains of this injured princess were contemptuously covered with the old cloth that had been torn from the billiard-table, and carried into a large upper chamber, where the process of embalming was performed the following day by surgeons from Stamford and Peterborough.

42 THE CONSTANCY OF NATURE.

DANA.

R. H. DANA, born at Cambridge, Mass., 1787, ranks high as a poet, and is surpassed by none of our prose writers in the clearness, purity and classic grace of his style and diction.

1. How like eternity doth nature seem

To life of man

-that short and fitful dream!
I look around me: nowhere can I trace

Lines of decay that mark our human race.
These are the murmuring waters, these the flowers
I mused o'er in my earlier, better hours.

Like sounds and scents of yesterday they come.
Long years have past since this was last my home!
And I am weak, and toil-worn is my frame;

But all this vale shuts in is still the same:

"Tis I alone am changed; they know me not:
I feel a stranger-or as one forgot.

2. The breeze that cool'd my warm and youthful brow
Breathes the same freshness on its wrinkles now.
The leaves that flung around me sun and shade,
While gazing idly on them, as they play'd,
Are holding yet their frolic in the air;
The motion, joy, and beauty still are there,
But not for me;-I look upon the ground:
Myriads of happy faces throng me round,
Familiar to my eye; yet heart and mind
In vain would now the old communion find.
Ye were as living, conscious beings then,

With whom 1 talk'd--But I have talk'd with men!

With uncheer'd sorrow, with cold hearts I've met;
Seen honest minds by harden'd craft beset.
Seen hope cast down, turn deathly pale its glow;
Seen virtue rare, but more of virtue's show

43. THE HUMMING-BIRD.

AUDUBON.

JOHN J. AUDUBON was born in Louisiana, in 1780. His "Birds of Amer ica," in seven imperial octavo volumes, was pronounced by the great Cuvier the most splendid monument which art has erected to ornithology. He died in 1851.

1. WHERE is the person, who on observing this glittering fragment of the rainbow, would not pause, admire, and instantly turn his mind with reverence towards the Almighty Creator, the wonders of whose hand we at every step discover, and ot whose sublime conceptions we everywhere observe the manifestations in his admirable system of creation? There breathes not such a person; so kindly have we all been blessed with that intuitive and noble feeling-admiration.

2. No sooner has the returning sun again introduced the vernal season, and caused millions of plants to expand their leaves and blossoms to his genial beams, than the little humming-bird is seen advancing on fairy wings, carefully visiting every opening flower-cup, and, like a curious florist, removing from each the injurious insect that otherwise would ere long cause their beauteous petals to droop and decay.

3. Poised in the air, it is observed peeping cautiously, and with sparkling eye, into their innermost recesses, while the ethereal motions of its pinions, so rapid and so light, appear to fan and cool the flower, without injuring its fragile texture, and produce a delightful murmuring sound, well adapted for lulling the insects to repose. . . . The prairies, the fields, the orchards, the gardens, nay the deepest shades of the forest, are all visited in their turn, and everywhere the little bird meets with pleasure and with food.

4. Its gorgeous throat in brilliancy and beauty baffles all competition. Now it glows with a fiery hue, and again it is

changed to the deepest velvety black. The upper parts of its delicate body are of resplendent changing green; and it throws itself through the air with a swiftness and vivacity hardly conceivable. It moves from one flower to another like a gleam of light, upward, downward, to the right, and to the left. In this manner it searches the extreme northern portions of our ountry, following, with great precaution the advances of the eason, and retreats, with equal care, at the approach of Autumn.

44. DESCRIPTION OF NATURE IN THE CHRISTIAN FATHERS

HUMBOLDT.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT, a German baron, born in Berlin, 1769, and died in 1859, the most distinguished savant of the nineteenth century. He was the author of many profound and erudite works on natural and scientific subjects.

1. At the period when the feeling died away which Lad animated classical antiquity, and directed the minds of men to a visible manifestation of human activity rather than to a passive contemplation of the external world, a new spirit arose. Christianity gradually diffused itself, and wherever it was adopted as the religion of the State, it not only exercised a beneficial influence on the condition of the lower classes by inculcating the social freedom of mankind, but also expanded the views of men in their communion with nature. The eye

no longer rested on forms of the Olympic gods. The Fathers of the Church, in their rhetorically correct and often poc'ically imaginative language, now taught that the Creator showed himself in inanimate no less than in animate nature, and in the wild strife of the elements, no less than in the still activity of organic development.

2. At the gradual dissolution of the Roman dominion, cretive imagination, simplicity, and purity of diction, disappeared from the writings of that dreary age; first in the Latin territories, and then in Grecian Asia Minor. A taste for solitude, for mournful contemplation, and for a moody absorption of mind, may be traced simultaneously, in the style and coloring of the language.

3. Whenever a new element seems to develop itself in the feelings of mankind, it may almost invariably be traced to an earlier, deep-seated, individual germ. Thus the softness of Mimnermus has often been regarded as the expression of a general sentimental direction of the mind. The ancient world is not abruptly separated from the modern, but modifications in the religious sentiments and the tenderest social feelings of men, and changes in the special habits of those who exercise an influence on the ideas of the mass, must give a sudden predominance to that which might previously have escaped attention.

4. It was the tendency of the Christian mind to prove from the order of the universe, and the beauty of nature, the greatness and goodness of the Creator. This tendency to glorify the Deity in his works gave rise to a taste for natural descriptions. The earliest and most remarkable instances of this kind are to be met with in the writings of Minucius Felix, a rhetorician and lawyer at Rome, who lived in the beginning of the third century, and was the contemporary of Tertullian and Philostratus.

5. We follow with pleasure the delineation of his twilight rambles on the shore near Ostia, which he describes as more picturesque, and more conducive to health, than we find it in the present day. In the religious discourse entitled Octavius, we meet with a spirited defence of the new faith against the attacks of a heathen friend.

6. The present would appear to be a fitting place to introduce some fragmentary examples of the descriptions of nature, which occur in the writings of the Greek fathers, and which are probably less known to my readers than the evidences afforded by Roman authors, of the love of nature entertained by the ancient Italians.

7. I will begin with a letter of Basil the Great, for which I have long cherished a special predilection. Basil, who was born at Cesarea, in Cappadocia, renounced the pleasures of Athens when not more than thirty years old, and, after visiting the Christian hermitages in Caelo-Syria and Upper Egypt retired to a desert on the shores of the Armenian river Ins He thus writes to Gregory of Nazianzen :