frequented that apartment, he was certain of having it entirely to himself. "I wonder how much the rascal will have the conscience to ask for this time?" he thought, as he slowly opened the unacceptable epistle. But what did he behold in it? It was well that he was alone at that moment. The hue of death had suddenly come over his features, the skin of his face had become livid, almost blue, and his eyeballs stared wildly at vacancy. Falling back in his chair for a few minutes, he sat thusand if ever mortal man suffered agony, he did during that short period of speechless emotion. At length he heaved a deep sigh, which was almost a groan. Then, starting up in the utmost excitement from his chair, he crushed the letter in his clammy hand, while he poured forth, in low, broken words, imprecations and maledictions on the head of the detested writer; and then, crouching down again in his chair, he gasped: Coming back to England! The party of whom he was so much in fear is dead-no one can prove anything against him now in that old affair-he does not get on in the States-there are too many scoundrels like himself there, I suppose-he wants money to pay some few debts and his passage home-I am to forward a remittance without delay—and he will hope to shake hands with me at Woodbury in about six weeks! "Shake hands with me! I should like to see him dangling from a gallows. I may as well shoot myself at once, if he returns, for he will make life a hell to me. What am I to do? If I send him money, he will start by the very first steamer. Perhaps I had better not send him any, and pretend not to have received his impudent letter. But that might anger him, and one has no hold over such a brute. I had hoped never to have seen his face again. What shall I do? There is no one on earth whom I can consult no one to whom I can express a single feeling of the many that are weighing me down at this moment! Agnes has plenty of good sense, but we are now so estranged that I cannot go to her, and explain to her how matters stand-I could hardly have done this in any case. And yet and yet-in other days she would have stood by me through thick and thin." Alfred thought with some reviving tenderness of his neglected and illused wife, and he could not help feeling how wantonly he had outraged and thrown away the devoted affection of such a woman,-she who could and would have carried out the sentiment conveyed in these beautiful lines, I know not, I ask not, if guilt's in that heart, SILENCE DEEP AS DEATH. A CUE FROM CAMPBELL. BY FRANCIS JACOX. CAMPBELL never wrote anything more spirited than the Battle of the Baltic; nor is there a more telling passage in it-nor, perhaps, of its kind, in universal literature-than that noble picture of the British fleet in line for action, and the Danes that confronted and defied them : It was ten of April morn by the chime: As they drifted on their path, And the boldest held his breath, Shakspeare's description-purposely high-wrought and rhetorical (for it is mouthed by a professional player, declaiming to order)-of Pyrrhus suddenly arrested in his onset against reverend Priam, contains an image of those intervals of hushed suspense in nature, when, as Virgil puts it, simul ipsa silentia terrent, the very silence is dreadful: But, as we often see, against some storm, A silence in the heavens, the rack* stand still, In one of Dryden's paraphrased translations from Boccace, an “awful pause" occurs, on the on-rush of the grisly sprite to seize and slay the visionary maid: "The pale assistants," we read (an instance of the use, by our older writers, of the word assist in what is sometimes assumed to be an exclusively French sense): The pale assistants on each other stared, With gaping mouths for issuing words prepared; a silence perhaps the more shocking for the bootless effort to break it, in fragmentary spasms of inarticulate speech. And it is the more a silence that (like the Egyptian Darkness) may be felt, because of the immediate antecedent of an outburst of cries-the shrieks of women, mingled with the hoarse baying of the Wild Huntsman's hounds. Byron makes this sort of silence audible to us in a well-known stanza: Thrice sounds the clarion; lo, the signal falls, The den expands, and Expectation mute Gapes round the silent Circle's peopled walls.§ * Light clouds. Theodore and Honoria. † Hamlet, Act II. Sc. 2. § Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto i. st. lxxv. So does Scott, in the brawl at bridal feast: While thus for blows and death prepared, Ere bursts the thunder on the hill.* And he opens the next canto, with this note of interrogation: Hast thou not mark'd, when o'er thy startled head How, when its echoes fell, a silence dead Sunk on the wood, the meadow, and the wold? Snatches of festive silence, so to speak, are interspersed here and there through a banquet scene in Leigh Hunt's poem of the Palfrey; as where the King suddenly calls out the name of Sir Guy de Paul,-whereat The music stopped with awe and wonder, Like discourse when speaks the thunder ; Gazed upon Sir Guy de Paul. Anon the revelry is renewed, and laughter runs riot in tumultuating excess, until of a sudden again Out spoke the King with wrathful breath, Can aught be stiller than that? The poet implies as much, affirms as much, when presently a new spectacle attracts all gazers, And, as the King had given command, In rode a couple, hand in hand, Who made the stillness stiller. Plutarch works up the scene of Numa's election to be King of Rome with a critical hush on the part of an expectant crowd. The chief of the augurs covered Numa's head, and stood behind him, praying, and watching for flight of birds, or other signal from the gods. "An incredible silence reigned among the people, anxious for the event, and lost in sus * The Lord of the Isles, canto ii. st. xviii. † Ibid., canto iii. st. i., ii. The Palfrey, part v., passim. pense, till the auspicious birds appeared and passed on the right hand."* Whereupon the people burst from silence into tumultuous shouting, and hailed the Sabine, king. Dr. Blair, that very modern Longinus, was captivated exceedingly by the famous image in Tacitus, quale magni metus et magna iræ silentium est;t-a passage which competent classical criticism has allowed to be well and fully represented in the latest of English translations: it scriptive of Galba being hurried to and fro with every movement of the surging crowd-the halls and temples all around being thronged with spectators of this dismal sight: "Not a voice was heard from the people or even from the rabble. Everywhere were terror-stricken countenances, and ears turned to catch every sound. It was a scene neither of agitation nor of repose, but there reigned the silence of profound alarm and profound indignation."‡ Magni metus et magna iræ silentium-for a while. Gibbon's description of the excitement in Rome on the night of the assassination of the Emperor Commodus, vilest of the vile, includes this passage on the demeanour of the Senate, called together, on a sudden, before the break of day, to meet the guards, and ratify the election of a new emperor (Pertinax). "For a few minutes they sat in silent suspense," occasioned by doubt as to the reality-too good to be true?—of their unexpected deliverance, and by suspicion of Commodus only playing them some cruel trick. No sooner, however, were the conscript fathers assured that the tyrant was no more, than they "resigned themselves to all the transports of joy and indignation."|| In the song that Moses and the children of Israel sang, when the Egyptian horse and his rider, their pursuers, had been thrown into the sea, exulting notes were struck on the dread that should take hold on the inhabitants of Palestina. To Him that had delivered and would yet deliver Israel was this song sung, and to the confusion of His foes: Fear and dread should fall upon them: by the greatness of His arm they should be as still as a stone, till His people passed over, till the people passed over which He had purchased.-Nor again be it forgotten that when, as seen from Patmos, the seventh seal was opened, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. Thucydides may be said to have immortalised the "solemn and touching moment," as Mr. Grote calls it, of silence-profound, intensified, wistful silence of the whole population of Athens, assembled on the shores of Piræus, to see the Sicilian expedition off. That the silence was followed by a burst of "prayer and praise" from the voices of crews and spectators alike, only enhances the original effect. When Francis Xavier inspirited the dismayed people of Malacca to resist the Moslem, his life was for a time in instant jeopardy-for he, the idol of the preceding hour, as Sir James Stephen says, was now the object Tacit. Hist., l. i. c. xl. * Plut. in Vit. Num. From the version by Messrs. A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb. (Macmillan, 1864.) § Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. iv. Wenck, citing Dion, calls Gibbon's picture of the "silent suspense" more imaginary than historical. of popular fury. As he knelt before the altar, the menacing crowd were "scarcely restrained by the sanctity of the place from immolating him there as a victim to his own disastrous counsels." Still he knelt, and prayed, with mien and in tones of passionate fervour. So fervid, and so impassioned, indeed, that a solemn pause ensued. "One half hour of deep and agonising silence held the awe-stricken assembly in breathless expectation"-when, bounding to his feet, his countenance radiant with joy, and his voice clear and ringing as with the swelling notes of the trumpet, he exclaimed that Christ had conquered, and that at that very moment his invading foes were being slaughtered and put to shame.* It was when the same Apostle of the Indies, bound for China, passed through the gates of Malacca to the beach, followed by a grateful and admiring people, that, as he fell on his face on the earth, and as he there "poured forth a passionate, though silent prayer," his body heaving and shaking with the throes of inward conflict, a contagious terror is said to have passed from eye to eye, but every voice was hushed. "It was as the calm preceding the first thunder-peal which is to rend the firmament.”† For when he arose, it was to vent sacred indignation, expressed with vehement action, against the devoted city. On the return of Cortes to Mexico, on Midsummer-day, 1520, the historian specially notes the difference the scene presented from that of his former entrance. "A death-like stillness brooded over the scene," as the Spanish general rode moodily on at the head of his battalions,-“ a stillness that spoke louder to the heart than the acclamations of multitudes."‡ When Montezuma finally consented to interpose with his infuriated subjects on behalf of the Spaniards, his presence was instantly recognised by the people, and, as the royal retinue advanced along the battlements, a change, we are told, as if by magic, came over the scene. "The clang of instruments, the fierce cries of the assailants, were hushed, and a deathlike stillness pervaded the whole assembly, so fiercely agitated but a few moments before by the wild tumult of war."§ On that 20th of September on the Alma, likened by Mr. Kinglake to some remembered day of June in England, for the sun was unclouded, and the soft breeze of the morning had lulled to a breath at noontide, and was creeping faintly along the hills,-then it was that "in the Allied armies there occurred a singular pause of sound-a pause so general as to have been observed and remembered. by many in remote parts of the ground, and so marked that its interruption by the mere neighing of an angry horse seized the attention of thousands; and although this strange silence was the mere result of weariness and chance, it seemed to carry a meaning, for it was now that after near forty years of peace the great nations of Europe were once more meeting for battle."|| Washington Irving, in one of his letters from Madrid, gives an animated description of a review of the national guard by the Regent, Espartero, and seems to have been particularly struck by one incident in the display. Espartero took his place in the centre of the esplanade, and, * See Sir James Stephen's Ecclesiastical Essays, vol. i. p. 216, 3rd ed. Prescott, History of Conquest of Mexico, book iv. ch. viii. Ibid., book v. ch. i. Kinglake's History of the Invasion of the Crimea, vol. ii. |