How in the noon of night that pibroch thrills, Savage and shrill! But with the breath which fills With the fierce native daring which instils The stirring memory of a thousand years, And Evan's, Donald's fame rings in each clansman's ears! And Ardennes waves above them her green leaves, Dewy with Nature's tear-drops, as they pass, Ere evening to be trodden like the grass Which now beneath them, but above shall grow In its next verdure, when this fiery mass Of living valor, rolling on the foe, And burning with high hope, shall moulder cold and low. Last noon beheld them full of lusty life, Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay, The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife, The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rent, Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent, The Defense of Hofer, the Tyrolese Patriot. You ask what I have to say in my defense, you, who glory in the name of France, who wander through the world to enrich and exalt the land of your birth; you demand how I could dare arm myself against the invaders of my native rocks. Do you confine the love of home to yourselves? Do you punish in others the actions which you dignify among yourselves? Those stars which glitter on your breasts, do they hang there as a recompense for patient servitude? I see the smile of contempt which curls your lips. You say, "This brute! he is a ruffian! a beggar! That patched jacket, that ragged cap, that rusty belt! Shall barbarians such as he close the pass against us, shower rocks on our heads, and single out our leaders with unfailing aim; these groveling mountaineers, who know not the joys and brilliance of life, creeping amid eternal snows, and snatching with greedy hand their stinted ear of corn!" Yet, poor as we are, we never envied our neighbors their smiling sun, their gilded palaces. We never strayed from our peaceful huts to blast the happiness of those who have injured us. The traveler who visited our valleys met every hand outstretched to welcome him; for him every hearth blazed as we listened to his tale of distant lands. Too happy for ambition, we were not iealous of wealth; we have even refused to partake of it. Frenchmen! you have wives and children. When you return to your beautiful cities, amid the roar of trumpets, the smiles of the lovely, and the multitude shouting their triumphs, they will ask, "Where have you roamed? What have you achieved? What have you brought back to us?" Those laughing babes who climb to your knees, will you have the heart to tell them, "We have pierced the barren crags, we have entered the naked cottage to level it to the ground; we found no treasures but honest hearts, and those we have broken because they throbbed with love for the wilderness around them. Clasp this old firelock in your little hands, it was snatched from a peasant of Tyrol, who died in the vain effort to stem the torrent?" Seated by your firesides, will you boast to your generous and blooming wives that you have extinguished the last ember that lighted our gloom? Happy scenes! I shall never see you more! In those cold, stern eyes I read my fate. Think not that your sentence can be terrible to me, but I have sons, daughters, and a wife who has shared all my labors; she has shared, too, my little pleasures, such pleasures as that humble roof can yield, pleasures that you cannot understand. My little ones! should you live to bask in the sunshine of manhood, dream not of your father's doom! Should you live to know it, know, too, that the man who has served his God and his country with all his heart can smile at the musket leveled to pierce it! What is death to me? I have not revelled in pleasures wrung from innocence and want; rough and discolored as these hands are, they are pure. My death is nothing. Oh, that my country could live! Oh, that ten thousand such deaths could make her immortal! Do I despair then? No. We have rushed to the sacrifice, and the offering has been in vain for us; but our children shall burst these fetters; the blood of virtue was never shed in vain; Freedom can never die. I have heard that you killed your king once because he enslaved you, yet, now, again you crouch before a single man who bids you trample on all who abjure his yoke, and shoots you if you have courage to disobey. Do you think that, when I am buried, there shall breathe no other Hofers? Dream you that, if today you prostrate Hofer in the dust, tomorrow Hofer is no more? In the distance I see liberty which I shall not taste; behind I look on my slaughtered countrymen, on my orphans, on my desolate fields; but a star rises before my aching sight which points to justice, and it shall come! SELECTIONS CHOSEN FOR THEIR VALUE AS STUDIES IN PAUSE Pause is concerned with the silences in speech. All those cessations of sound that occur in the course of utterance, whether between words, sentences, or paragraphs, come under Pause. Pause has relation to both thought and feeling. If we listen attentively to animated conversation we shall observe that the silences of the speaker have a bearing upon the idea itself, and also upon the emotional attitude toward the thought. Pause as concerned with thought manifests the relationship of words. In the phrase, "deep and dark blue ocean," if a longer pause is made after "deep" than after the other words, we understand that the ocean is deep and the color a dark blue. If this longer pause is after "dark" it indicates to us that the ocean is not of dark blue color but of blue, and that it (the ocean) is not only deep but dark. If the longer pause is after "blue" we understand that the ocean is of a blue color that is deep and dark. In each case a change in the relative length of the pause after a given word indicated a new relationship of words. Applied to thought, therefore, the listener understands pause as follows: the longer the pause the less close the verbal relationship, and, obversely, the shorter the pause the closer the relationship. The law, then, |