squadrons and battalions are crushed and dispersed against each other. In vain does Napoleon make walls with the remains of the Guard; in vain does he expend his reserve squadrons in a last effort. Napoleon gallops along the fugitives, harangues them, urges, threatens, entreats. The mouths, which in the morning were crying vive l'Empereur, are now agape; he is hardly recognized. 13. The Prussian cavalry, just come up, spring forward, fling themselves upon the enemy, saber, cut, hack, kill, exterminate. Teams rush off, the guns are left to the care of themselves; the soldiers of the train unhitch the caissons and take the horses to escape; wagons upset, with their four wheels in the air, block up the road, and are accessories of massacre. They crush and they crowd; they trample upon the living and the dead. Arms are broken. A multitude fills roads, paths, bridges, plains, hills, valleys, woods, choked up by this flight of forty thousand men. Cries, despair, knapsacks and mus kets cast into the rye, passages forced at the point of the sword; no more comrades, no more officers, no more generals; inexpressible dismay. 14. In the gathering night, on a field near Genappe, Bernard and Bertrand seized by a flap of his coat and stopped a haggard, thoughtful, gloomy man, who, dragged thus far by the current of the rout, had dismounted, passed the bridle of his horse under his arm, and, with bewildered eye, was returning alone toward Waterloo. It was Napoleon endeavoring to advance again, mighty somnambulist of a vanished dream. George D. Prentice, an American poet and journalist, was born at Preston, Connecticut, in 1802, and graduated at Brown University at the age of twenty-one. He founded, in 1828, The New England Review, and having removed to Kentucky, became editor of the Louisville Journal, which soon acquired the reputation of one of the ablest and mot brilliant journals in the country. He has published a small volume of beautiful poems. A book called Prenticiana, which contains a collection of his witticisms, appeared in 1800. He died in 1870. 2. IS midnight's holy hour,-and silence now Is brooding like a gentle spirit o'er The still and pulseless world. Hark! on the winds Is sweeping past; yet, on the stream and wood, Young Spring, bright Summer, Autumn's solemn form, In mournful cadences that come abroad Like the far wind-harp's wild and touching wail, Gone from the earth forever. 'Tis a time For memory and for tears. Within the deep, And holy visions that have passed away, And left no shadow of their loveliness On the dead waste of life. That specter lifts The coffin-lid of hope, and joy, and love, And, bending mournfully above the pale, Sweet forms that slumber there, scatters dead flowers 4. Has gone, and with it many a glorious throng It passed o'er The battle plain, where sword, and spear, and shield, In the dim land of dreams. 5. Remorseless Time! Fierce spirit of the glass and scythe! What power Can stay him in his silent course, or melt His own heart to pity? On, still on He presses, and forever. The proud bird, Through heaven's unfathomable depths, or brave And bathe his plumage in the thunder's home, 6. Knows not the weight of sleep or weariness, And night's deep darkness has no chain to bind Revolutions sweep O'er earth like troubled visions o'er the breast |