visible spirits--the rapture, terror, grief
Of faith so human, than the drear negations
Of dumb, dead unbelief!

--But will you hear the story?
--In a forest,
Girt round by blacken'd tarns, a hermit dwelt:
And as one midnight, when the storm raged sorest,
Within his hut he knelt

In ghostly penance, sounds of fiendish laughter
Smote on the tempest's lull with sudden jar,
That sent the gibbering echoes shrilling after,
O'er weir and wold afar.

"Christ ban ye now!"--he cried, the door wide flinging,
"Fare ye some whither with perdition's dole?"
--"We go"--out from the wrack a shriek came ringing--
"To seize the emperor's soul,

"Who lies this hour death-smitten." Execration
Thereat still fouler filled the sulphurous air:
Before the rood the hermit sank:--"Salvation
Grant, Lord! in his despair!"

And agonizing thus, with lips all ashen,
He prayed--till back, with ghastlier rage and roar,
The demon rout rushed, strung to fiercer passion,
And crashed his osier door.

"Speak, fiend!--I do adjure thee!--Came repentance
Too late?"--With wrathful curse was answer made:
--"Heaped high within the Judgment Scales for sentence,
The emperor's sins were laid;

"And downward, downward, with a plunge descended
_Our_ scale, till we exulted!--when a moan,
--'_Save, Christ, O save me!_'--from his lips was rended
Out with his dying groan.

"Quick in the other scale did Mercy lay it,
_Lo! it outweighed his guilt_--"
--"Ha,--baffled! braved!"--
The hermit cried;--"Hence, fiends! nor dare gainsay it,
_The emperor's soul is saved!_"

MARGARET J. PRESTOX.

CHATEAUBRIAND'S DUCKS.

Francois-Auguste de Chateaubriand, the illustrious author of the _Genie
du Christianisme_, the poet, statesman, diplomatist, soldier, and
traveler in the Old World and the New, was one of the two or three human
beings who, at the commencement of the nineteenth century, disputed with
the emperor Napoleon the attention of Europe. Sprung from an old family
of the Breton nobility--a race preserving longer perhaps than any other
in France the traditions of the mo