THE KING IN THULE.

There was a king in Thule,
Was true till death I ween:
A vase he had of the ruddy gold,
The gift of his dying queen.

He never pass'd it from him--
At banquet 'twas his cup;
And still his eyes were fill'd with tears
Whene'er he took it up.

So when his end drew nearer,
He told his cities fair,
And all his wealth, except that cup,
He left unto his heir.

Once more he sate at royal board,
The knights around his knee,
Within the palace of his sires,
Hard by the roaring sea.

Up rose the brave old monarch,
And drank with feeble breath,
Then threw the sacred goblet down
Into the flood beneath.

He watch'd its tip reel round and dip,
Then settle in the main;
His eyes grew dim as it went down--
He never drank again.

* * * * *

We shall now venture on an extravaganza which might have been well
illustrated by Hans Holbein. It is in the ultra-Germanic taste, such as
in our earlier days, whilst yet the Teutonic alphabet was a mystery, we
conceived to be the staple commodity of our neighbours. We shall never
quarrel with a wholesome spice of superstition; but, really, Hoffmann,
Apel, and their fantastic imitators, have done more to render their
national literature ridiculous, than the greatest poets to redeem it.
The following poem of Goethe is a strange piece of sarcasm directed
against that school, and is none the worse, perhaps, that it somewhat
out-herods Herod in its ghostly and grim solemnity. Like many other
satires, too, it verges closely upon the serious. We back it against any
production of M. G. Lewis.

THE DANCE OF DEATH.

The warder look'd down at the depth of night
On the graves where the dead were sleeping,
And, clearly as day, was the pale moonlight
O'er the quiet churchyard creeping.
One after another the gravestones began
To heave and to open, and woman and man
Rose up in their ghastly apparel!

Ho--ho for the dance!--and the phantoms outsprung
In skeleton roundel advancing,
The rich and the poor, and the old and the young,
But the winding-sheets hinder'd their dancing.
No shame had these revellers wasted and grim,
So they shook off the cerements from body and limb,
And scatter'd them over the hillocks.

They crook'd their thighbones, and they shook their long shanks,
And wild was their reeling and limber;
And ea