catch a glimpse of their coming friends: not a speck was to be seen in the blue distance, where the canoe of the savage dared not venture, and the sail of the white man was not yet spread. Gonzalo Pizarro's expedition, some sixteen years later, when Orellana sailed down the Amazon, had its corresponding picture of suffering expectancy: "Days and weeks passed away, yet the vessel did not return; and no speck was to be seen on the waters, as the Spaniards strained their eyes to the farthest point, where the line of light faded in the dark shadows of the foliage on the borders." Southey's return of Madoc to Aztlan recurs to the memory; for although No watchman had been station'd on the height ... [And] all his pleasure was at earliest light If he might see the sails where far away Through wide savannahs roll'd the silver stream. Oh, then with what a sudden start his blood Flow'd from its quicken'd spring, when far away Of Lord Cornwallis, besieged in Yorktown, historians (of Old, not New England) sympathisingly surmise how often and anxiously he must have looked out for a white sail gleaming in the distance on the blue waters of the bay. In a like spirit Earl Stanhope relates the relief from England to the ahungred defenders of Gibraltar in 1781-how they beheld with delight from their ramparts, one morning as the mist slowly rolled away, the flag-ship of Admiral Darby steer into their bay, followed by several other men-of-war and by his convoy, consisting of near a hundred vessels laden with provisions and supplies. In the same noble author's Life of Pitt, we have a rememberable glimpse of Napoleon in Boulogne in 1805, all expectation and suspense: "For hours and hours together he was seen to stand on the seashore straining his eyes along the vast expanse, and watching for a sail to rise on the blue horizon." One of Schill and his troops at Stralsund, four years later, is quotable from Alison, who, with reproachful reflections on English apathy, describes all eyes as turned in vain towards the ocean in vain every steeple was crowded with gazers anxiously surveying with telescopes the distant main; not a friendly sail appeared, not a pennon of England brought hope and consolation to the besieged. The Russian generals who repulsed so vigorously the attack on the citadel of Smolensko by Ney's corps, are yet described as most anxiously looking out for the approach of the main army at length vast clouds of dust were seen afar off, and through their openings long black columns, resplendent with steel, appeared advancing with uttermost speed: it was Barclay and Bagrathion hastening to the relief of their comrades, at the head of a hundred and twenty thousand men ; and rapturous was the enthusiasm of the besieged. But examples to the same effect might be multiplied indefinitely from history, let alone fiction, historical or otherwise.* Let us glance instead at some passages in miscellaneous literature which may be taken to illustrate divers aspects of our theme. Tiberius is gloomily pictured by Thomson, as, day after day, * Not to let it quite alone, however, reference may be allowed, in passing, to the Fair Maid of Perth on the castle top, gazing on the forest glade through which she could see a body of horsemen advancing at full gallop-in time to save Catharine, though not the Duke of Rothsay. And again, to Henry Morton in the hands of the Covenanters, when his death is delayed by that distant noise which, to one of them, sounds like the rushing of the brook over the pebbles,—to another, as the sough of the wind among the bracken: "It is the galloping of horse," said Morton to himself, his sense of hearing rendered acute by the peril of his position. "God grant they may come as my deliverers!" As indeed they did. Nor be overlooked the weird figure of Scott's Highland Widow, as she sat at her cottage door and watched the road-her imagination forming out of the morning mist or the evening cloud the wild forms of an advancing band of "dark soldiers," Sidier Dhu; albeit for so long in vain Elspat's eyes surveyed the distant path, by the earliest light of the dawn and the latest sad on the jutting eminence he sat, and viewed the main that ever toils below; "Still fondly forming in the farthest verge, Where the round ether mixes with the wave, Ships, dim-discovered, dropping from the clouds.” Byron gives us Medora rising to rouse the beacon-fire, and outwatching each star, night after night,— "And morning came—and still thou wert afar. Another came-Oh, joy! 'twas thine at last!" In the tragedy of Constantine Paleologus, the second act closes with the signal cries of a ship in sight, "supplies and warlike aid. O blessed sound! there is salvation in it" to the brave besieged. The same dramatist's better-known Family Legend has a sensation scene of a gentle outcast on a rock at seathe scene concluding with her excitement and emotion at catching, as she believes, a sound of voices in the wind, like hope upon a hopeless state. She starts up from a crag of the rock, gazes eagerly around her, and resolves, glimmer of the twilight: no rising dust awakened the expectation of nodding plumes or flashing arms.—Compare, or contrast, with this last figure, that of Madonna Mary as Mrs. Oliphant sketches her, when she wandered from room to room, watching the two bits of road, as the shadows of evening stole into the corners, and a star, which it made her heart sick to see, peeped out in the darkling sky-first the one bit of road, which was fainter and farther off, then the other, which was overshadowed by trees, yet visible and near every time that she changed the point of watching, she felt sure that her boy must be coming; but the stars peeped out in numbers, and the lamps were lighted on the road, and he appeared not.—If Romola's picturesque or classical form occurs to us in any such connection as this, it is on account of the simile her attitude suggests, when we see her, as she sees herself, as in the midst of a storm-troubled sea, caring nothing about the storm, but only about holding out a signal till the eyes that looked for it could see it no more. "I'll to that highest crag and take my stand: May to my eager gaze a vessel grow Some onward wearing thing—some boat-some raft— And in yet another of the Plays on the Passion, Ethwald, there is a tower-top scene, which opens with Bertha exclaiming— Murd. "O, will they ne'er appear? I'll look no more; Mine eager gazing but retards their coming. Holla; good Murdoch!— Thou putst thy hand above thy sunnèd eyes, Mercy, gentle lady, If you descry them not from that high perch, May that allowably make way to Wordsworth's Betty Foy, high upon the down, where she can see a mile of road, but not a single soul abroad? "She listens, but she cannot hear The foot of horse, the voice of man; The streams with softest sound are flowing, More consonant with the sustained dignity of the poet's larger style, is a passage in his Prelude, where he describes his wistful watching, as a schoolboy, for the envoy that should summon him home: "There rose a crag, That, from the meeting-point of two highways Scout-like, and gained the summit: 'twas a day XVIII. THE LAST OF SENNACHERIB. 2 KINGS xix. 28 sq. HE last march of Sennacherib, as chronicled in holy. writ, was a disastrous failure. Overwhelming as might seem to be his invading host, and inevitable the destruction it menaced, the virgin, the daughter of Zion, was emboldened to despise him, and laugh him to scorn-the daughter of Jerusalem, to shake her head at him. Imposing as was his array, multitudinous as were the ranks of his army, he should not come into Jerusalem, nor shoot an arrow there, nor cast a bank against it. By the way that he came, by the same should he return, but should not come into that city, decreed the King of Kings. What was this invading lord of a host, against Zion's protecting Lord of Hosts? So much for Sennacherib's last military progress. It was to provoke derision from its intended victim, presumably helpless and despairing. True, there was an appalling tragedy in the background; but meanwhile the irony of high comedy was to be, in Jerusalem, the inspired order of the day. The King of Assyria was to go back by the way that he came, re infectâ, and to be laughed at for his pains. "A fixèd figure, for the time of scorn, To point his slow unmoving finger at." History is apt to be scornful of any such portentous expedition, resulting in zero or worse. Charles VI. of France exhausted his resources in the equipment of such a force, for the invasion of England, and had to return foiled to Paris, after desolating by the consequences of that march the face of the country which he traversed. Our Edward II. obeyed his father's injunctions to prosecute the war in Scotland, to the extent of proceeding on his march into that country as far as Cumnock in Ayrshire; but here he turned round without having done anything, and made his way back to England. |