at pale utter gentleness.

--Eyes of heaven, that pass and peep,
Do not question, if she sleep!
She has no abiding here,
She is past the starry sphere;
Kneeling with the children sweet
At the palm-wreathed altar's feet;
--Innocents who died like thee,
Heaven-ward through man's cruelty,
To the love-smiles of their Lord
Borne through pain and fire and sword.

Elizabeth, second daughter of Charles I. and Henrietta Maria, was born on
Innocents' Day, 1635. The incident accounted in Stanza iv occurred in
1637. She had been taken on a visit to Hampton Court to her mother, who
wished her to be present at her own vesper-service, when Elizabeth, not
yet two years old, became very restless. To quiet her a book of devotion
was shown to her.' The King, when the Queen drew his attention, said,
'She begins young!'

This tale is told by Mrs. Green, in her excellent _Princesses of
England_, (London, 1853),--a book deserving to be better known,--on the
authority of the Envoy Con.

The first grief of a very happy and promising childhood may have been the
loss of her sister Anne in 1640. But by 1642, the evils of the time
began to press upon Princess Elizabeth; her mother's departure from
England, followed by her own capture by order of the Parliament; her
confinement under conditions of varying severity; and the final farewell
to her father, Jan. 29, 1649.

From that time her life was overshadowed by the sadness of her father's
death, her own isolation, and her increasing feebleness of health. She
seems to have been a singularly winning and intelligent girl, and she
hence found or inspired affection in several of the guardians
successively appointed to take charge of her. But if she had not been
thus marked by beauty of nature, our indignant disgust would hardly be
less at the brutal treatment inflicted by the Puritan-Independent
authorities upon this child:--at the refusal of her prayer to be sent to
her elder sister Mary, in Holland; at the captivity in Carisbrook; at the
isolation in which she was left to die.--Yet it is not she who most
merits pity!

In this poem, written before the plan of the book had been formed, I find
that some slight deviation from the best authorities has been made.
Elizabeth's young brother Henry, Duke of Gloster, shared her prison: and
although her own physician, Mayerne, had been dismissed, yet some medical
attendance was supplied.--Henry Vaughan has described the patience of the
young suf