Thunder pealed and lightning quivered,
Gusts a prison's casements shivered.
From its dungeon rose a scream,
Where, awakened by the gleam,
From his pallet rose and ran,
Wild with fear, a stalwart man.
Saw he in his tortured sleep,
Things that make the heart-veins creep?
Swept he through the world of flame,
Chased by shapes that none may name?
Still, as bars and windows clanged,
Still he roared--"I _will_ be hanged."
Sleep had swept him o'er the seas,
To the drear antipodes;
There he saw a felon band,
Chains on neck, and spade in hand,
Orators, all sworn to die
In "Old Ireland's" cause--or fly!
Now, divorced from pike and pen,
Digging ditch, and draining fen,
Sky their ceiling, sand their bed,
Fed and flogged, and flogged and fed.
"Operatives!" he harangued;
"Ere I'm banished--I'll be hanged."
Now, he strove to strike a light,
But, a form of giant height
Through the crashing casement sprang;
Shattered stanchions round him rang,
From his eyes a light within
Showed the blackness of his skin;
In his lips a huge cigar
Smouldered, like a dying star;
Holding to the culprit's eyes,
Writ in flame, a scroll of lies,
Champing jaws with iron fanged,
"Friend," cried he, "you _shall_ be hanged."
'Twixt the tempter and the rogue,
Then began the dialogue:
--"Master--shall I rob the state?"
"Not, unless you'd dine off plate."
--"Shall I try my hand at law?"
"You'll be sure to make a flaw."
--"Shall I job in Parliament?"
"You'll be richer, cent per cent."
--"Shall I truckle, or talk big?"
"You'll but get a judge's wig,
Blockheads may be conscience-panged,
Knaves are pensioned, but, _not_ hanged!"
--"Master, _must_ I then escape?"
"No," exclaimed the knowing shape,
"You shall perish by Lynch-Law."
Through his skull he struck a claw,
On the tempest burst a wail,
Through the bars a serpent-tail,
Flashing like a lightning spire,
Seemed to set the cell on fire;
Far and wide was heard the clang,
Through the whirlwind as they sprang.
Many a year the sulphurous fume
Stung the nostril in that room.
The river widens, and we sweep along by the rich slopes and deep wooded
vales of the Kentish shore. From time to time little pastoral villages
emerge, from plantations of willows and poplars, and all water-loving
trees. Before coming to Purfleet, we had passed a noble hill, looking
over a vast expanse of country, on which stands a princely
mansion,--Belvedere, with its battlements glittering above groves as
thick as the depths of the Black Forest. This was once the mansion of
Lord Eardley, one of the greatest humorists of the age,--the companion
of George the Fourth, before he ceased to be a wit and became a king.
How many delightful things are lost to the world, by the world's own
laziness. Why have we not a Boswell in every city? Her majesty pays a
laureate, who writes nothing but the annual receipt for his pension. Why
not transfer the office to a Boswell? why not establish a Cabinet-dinner
Boswell? a Buckingham-palace Boswell? a Windsor Boswell? with orders to
make their weekly returns of gaiety and gossipry to the Home Department;
to be thence issued by instalments of anecdote, in volumes, like "Lord
Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors," or in columns, like the protocols
of the Montpensier marriage, for the laughter of mankind?
But the report of a heavy gun, and all eyes turned to a huge shell,
making its curve a mile above our heads, reminded us that the artillery
had a field-day as we passed Woolwich, and that there was every
possibility that this vagrant messenger of destruction, might plump into
our midships. The consternation on board grew, as it descended, looking
bigger and blacker every instant. If it had come on board, it must have
torn us up like paper. The catastrophe would have been invaluable to the
journals of the empire, at this moment of a dearth of news, enough to
make bankrupts of all the coffee-houses in London, and close every club
from Charing Cross to Hyde Park Corner. _We_ should all have been
immortal in paragraphs without number. Coroners, surgeons, poets, and
special juries, would have made their reputation out of _us_; and for a
month of hot weather, we should have been a refreshing topic in the
mouths of mankind. But it was otherwise decreed: the shell dropped
within a foot of the steamer, and we were _quittes pour la peur_.