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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.

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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

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Is brooding like a gentle spirit o'er

The still and pulseless world. Hark! on the winds
The bell's deep tones are swelling,-'tis the knell
Of the departing year. No funeral train

Is sweeping past; yet, on the stream and wood,
With melancholy light the moonbeams rest
Like a pale, spotless shroud; the air is stirred
As by a mourner's sigh; and on yon cloud
That floats so still and placidly through heaven,
The spirits of the seasons seem to stand,

Young Spring, bright Summer, Autumn's solemn form,
And Winter with his aged locks, and breathe

In mournful cadences that come abroad

Like the far wind-harp's wild and touching wail,
A melancholy dirge o'er the dead year,

Gone from the earth forever.

'Tis a time

For memory and for tears. Within the deep,
Still chambers of the heart, a specter dim,
Whose tones are like the wizard voice of Time
Heard from the tomb of ages, points its cold
And solemn finger to the beautiful

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
O'er what has passed to nothingness.

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4.

Has gone, and with it many a glorious throng
Of happy dreams. Its mark is on each brow,
Its shadow in each heart. In its swift course
It waved its scepter o'er the beautiful,
And they are not. It laid its pallid hand
Upon the strong man-and the haughty form
Is fallen, and the flashing eye is dim.
It trod the hall of revelry, where thronged
The bright and joyous-and the tearful wail
Of stricken ones is heard, where erst the song
And reckless shout resounded.

It passed o'er

The battle plain, where sword, and spear, and shield,
Flashed in the light of mid-day, and the strength
Of serried hosts is shivered, and the grass,
Green from the soil of carnage, waves above
The crushed and moldering skeleton. It came,
And faded like a wreath of mist at eve;
Yet, ere it melted in the viewless air,
It heralded its millions to their home

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,
The condor of the Andes, that can soar

Through heaven's unfathomable depths, or brave
The fury of the northern hurricane,

And bathe his plumage in the thunder's home,
Furls his broad wings at night-fall, and sinks down
To rest upon his mountain crag; but Time

6.

Knows not the weight of sleep or weariness,

And night's deep darkness has no chain to bind
His rushing pinions.

Revolutions sweep

O'er earth like troubled visions o'er the breast
Of dreaming sorrow; cities rise and sink
Like bubbles on the water; fiery isles
Spring blazing from the ocean, and go back
To their mysterious caverns; mountains rear
To heaven their bald and blackened cliffs, and bow
Their tall heads to the plain; new empires rise,
Gathering the strength of hoary centuries,
And rush down like the Alpine avalanche,
Startling the nations; and the very stars,
Yon bright and burning blazonry of God,
Glitter awhile in their eternal depths,
And, like the Pleiad, loveliest of their train,
Shoot from the glorious spheres, and pass away
To darkle in the trackless void; yet Time,
Time, the tomb-builder, holds his fierce career,
Dark, stern, all-pitiless, and pauses not
Amid the mighty wrecks that strew his path,
To sit and muse, like other conquerors,
Upon the fearful ruin he has wrought.

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