e holy work of fate
Russia's God will consecrate.

"'Tis decreed that they shall bleed
For their dark and trait'rous deed.
Poles! to us by conquest given,
Ye provoke the wrath of Heaven:
Therefore, purging sword and shot
Use we must, and spare you not.
Guardian of our northern faith,
Guide us to the field of death!

"Ere we've done, many a one
Shall weep they ever saw the sun.
Rouse the noble in his hall
To a fiery festival;
Dash the stubborn peasant's mirth--
Drown in blood his alien hearth;
Babe or mother, never falter--
Spear the priest before the altar.
Onward, and avenge our wrong!
God is good, and Russia strong!"

_Englishman's Magazine, No 1._

* * * * *

QUEEN ELIZABETH.

_From a paper on the Fine Arts of old in England, in Blackwood's
Magazine._

The sex and character of Elizabeth herself was no weak ingredient in the
poetic spirit of the time. Loyalty and gallantry blended in the
adoration paid her; and the supremacy which she claimed and exercised
over the church, invested her regality with a sacred unction that
pertained not to feudal sovereigns. It is scarce too much to say, that
the virgin-queen appropriated the Catholic honours of the Virgin Mary.
She was as great as Diana of the Ephesians. The moon shone but to
furnish a type of her bright and stainless maidenhood. To magnify her
greatness, the humility of courtly adulation merged in the ecstasies of
Platonic love. She was charming by indefeasible right;--a _jure
divino_ beauty. Her fascinations multiplied with her wrinkles, and
her admirers might have anticipated the conceit of Cowley,

"The antipevistoisis of age
More inflamed their amorous rage."

It is easy for a Whig, or a Puritan, or any other unimaginative
blockhead, to cry out against all this as nauseous flattery, and assert
that after all she was rather an unpoetical personage than otherwise--a
coarse-minded old maid, half prude, half coquette, whose better part was
mannish, and all that belonged to her sex a ludicrous exaggeration of
its weaknesses. But meanwhile, they overlook the fact, that not the
woman Elizabeth, but the Virgin-queen, the royal heroine, is the theme
of admiration. Not the petty virtues, the pretty sensibilities, the
cheap charity, the prim decorum, which modern flatterers dwell upon,
degrading royalty, while they palaver its possessor, but Britannia's
sacred majesty, enshri