a considerable portion to the use of the church. Surrounded by enemies, public and private, tormented by a thousand feuds, and threatened by the church with excommunication, Martin Waldeck, or, as we must now call him, the Baron Von Waldeck, often regretted bitterly the labours and sports of his unenvied poverty. But his courage failed him not under these difficulties, and seemed rather to augment in proportion to the danger which darkened around him, until an accident precipitated his fall.

A proclamation by the reigning duke of Brunswick had invited to a solemn tournament all German nobles of free and honourable descent, and Martin Waldeck, splendidly armed, accompanied by his two brothers, and a gallantly equipped retinue, had the arrogance to appear among the chivalry of the province, and demand permission to enter the lists. This was considered as filling up the measure of his presumption. A thousand voices exclaimed, "We will have no cinder-sifter mingle in our games of chivalry." Irritated to frenzy, Martin drew his sword and hewed down the herald, who, in compliance with the general outcry, opposed his entry into the lists. A hundred swords were unsheathed, to avenge what was in those days regarded as a crime only inferior to sacrilege, or regicide. Waldeck, after defending himself like a lion, was seized, tried on the spot by the judges of the lists, and condemned, as the appropriate punishment for breaking the peace of his sovereign, and violating the sacred person of a herald-at-arms, to have his right hand struck from his body, to be ignominiously deprived of the honour of nobility, of which he was unworthy, and to be expelled from the city. When he had been stripped of his arms, and sustained the mutilation imposed by this severe sentence, the unhappy victim of ambition was abandoned to the rabble, who followed him with threats and outcries levelled alternately against the necromancer and oppressor, which at length ended in violence. His brothers (for his retinue were fled and dispersed) at length succeeded in rescuing him from the hands of the populace, when, satiated with cruelty, they had left him half dead through loss of blood, and through the outrages he had sustained. They were not permitted, such was the ingenious cruelty of their enemies, to make use of any other means of removing him, excepting such a collier's cart as they had themselves formerly used, in which they deposited their brother on a truss of straw, scarcely expecting to reach any place of shelter ere death should release him from his misery.

When the Waldecks, journeying in this miserable manner, had approached the verge of their native country, in a hollow way, between two mountains, they perceived a figure advanced towards them, which at first sight seemed to be an aged man. But as he approached, his limbs and stature increased, the cloak fell from his shoulders, his pil

grim's staff was changed into an uprooted pine-tree, and the gigantic figure of the Harz demon passed before them in his terrors. When he came opposite to the cart which contained the miserable Waldeck, his huge features dilated into a grin of unutterable contempt and malignity, as he asked the sufferer, "How like you the fire My coals have kindled ?" The power of motion, which terror suspended in his two brothers, seemed to be restored to Martin by the energy of his courage. He raised himself on the cart, bent his brows, and, clenching his fist, shook it at the spectre with a ghastly look of hate and defiance. The goblin vanished with his usual tremendous and explosive laugh, and left Waldeck exhausted with this effort of expiring nature.

The terrified brethren turned their vehicle toward the towers of a convent, which arose in a wood of pine-trees beside the road. They were charitably received by a bare-footed and long-bearded capuchin, and Martin survived only to complete the first confession he had made since the day of his sudden prosperity, and to receive absolution from the very priest, whom precisely on that day three years, he had assisted to pelt out of the hamlet of Morgenbrodt. The three years of precarious prosperity were supposed to have a mysterious correspondence with the number of his visits to the spectral fire upon the hill.

The body of Martin Waldeck was interred in the convent where he expired, in which his brothers, having assumed the habit of the order, lived and died in the performance of acts of charity and devotion. His lands, to which no one asserted any claim, lay waste until they were reassumed by the emperor as a lapsed fief, and the ruins of the castle, which Waldeck had called by his own name, are still shunned by the miner and forester as haunted by evil spirits. Thus were the miseries attendant upon wealth, hastily attained and ill-employed, exemplified in the fortunes of Martin Waldeck.

THE HAUNTED RUIN.

IN days of yore, a lovely mansion stood

On Scotland's eastern, ocean-ravaged shore,
High on the cliffs, that smiled upon the flood-
Alike in summer's calm, and winter's roar.
Its walls were girdled with an ancient wood,
That to the uplands spread away; and o'er
The rocks adjacent, issuing from a glade,
A haunted stream became a white cascade.

It was a place of strength, albeit no hand

Was raised against it; and a deep trench ran,
Though all unfed by water, round it, for command

Of power, perchance, in buried years which man

Remembered not; now rioting weeds and sand
Were fast diminishing its ample span ;
And crumbling battlements on high looked down
In seeming sadness for their glory flown.

Its aspect spoke desertion; even the air
And winds of heaven its walls that visited,
Bore in their voice the accents of despair-

Low, murmuring, hollow tones, as from the dead; Abandonment and desolation there

Reigned quietly on thrones, dark, mute as lead;
Save when, but for a moment, from some tower,
A falling fragment broke their despot power.

The summer birds that sing in brake and tree,
Awakening earthly halleluias, ne'er
Created mirth around, though cheerily

The bright sun shone on morning gossamer,
And dewy leaves were glancing bonnily

Upon the forest boughs, so green and fair :-
The choral sisterhood, how could they sing,
When bats were flitting on their leathern wing?
And credulous superstition boldly said,

That shadowy forms were seen, and spectre men,
Gliding along, what time the moonlight made
The mansion brightly visible; and then
A maiden with a bleeding breast, arrayed
In white, walked to and fro, as one again
Visiting a scene that had been known before-
Resuming from the grave life's form once more.
But all within those massy walls was still,
As they by man had been untenanted;
And all around repulsive was and chill,

That even the beggar dared not sue for bread,
Though famine urged him in his hour of ill:

Rust sealed the portal, and a stranger's tread Ne'er sounded o'er the threshold, weed-o'ergrownRuin had claimed the mansion as his own!

D. A.

A HEBREW MELODY.

Sing us one of the songs of Zion-Psalm xxxvii. 3.

By the rivers of Babel, in exile forlorn,

O Zion, we sat in despair :

Yea, we wept for the home from which we were torn, And the temple of God that was there.

And our harps all unstrung

On the willow-trees hung,

For their tones now could only awaken
Gloomy thoughts of a grave,

Or the life of a slave,

And the land of our fathers forsaken.

Our spoilers required us in bondage to sing,

And sneering they gave the command;
But shall we make the echoes of Babylon ring
With the song of our dear native land?
Sing!-No-ne'er shall the ear

Of the Edomite hear

The sweet strains which to Zion belong-
With this hand I shall wring

From my heart every string,

Ere its melody mix in the song.

Judea, my country! more loved than the tide
Which flows through this worn frame of mine,
O, if thee I forget, may this right hand of pride
Fall shrunk by my side all supine!

And my tongue, be thou dumb,

And all lifeless become

With the dead on yon far Galilee,
If there's aught in this land

Can unloosen the band

That shall bind me for ever to thee!

But how could I dream that I e'er might forget
The shrine where my God was adored,

Or the land where the sun of my forefathers set,
Though profaned by the heathen abhorred.
Yes! it was but the gleam

Of a terrific dream,

That frenzied my brain as it passed,

For I e'er will think on,

All thy glory though gone,

And exult in thy name to the last.

Remember, great God, O remember the day
When Babylon's king cried in scorn,

"Let Jerusalem be razed-in dust let us lay
Those towers which proud Salem adorn."
O Babylon's daughter,

The day of thy slaughter

Shall in anguish yet fearfully run;

And full-blessed shall he be

Who avengeth on thee

All the deeds that in Judah were done.

And happy is he who shall list to thy groans,

And look on thy glories effaced,

Who all reckless shall dash thy babes on the stones, And leave thee a desolate waste.

For alas! we have been

Where wild carnage was seen The red arm of destruction to wield; When the children of God

'Neath the heathen were trod,

As if they'd been the dust of the field.

M. F.

OLD MAIDS.*

I LOVE an old maid;-I do not speak of an individual, but of the species, I use the singular number, as speaking of a singularity in humanity. An old maid is not merely an antiquarian, she is an antiquity; not merely a record of the past, but the very past itself, she has escaped a great change, and sympathizes not in the ordinary mutations of mortality. She inhabits a little eternity of her own. She is Miss from the beginning of the chapter to the end. I do not like to hear her called Mistress, as is sometimes the practice, for that looks and sounds like the resignation of despair, a voluntary extinction of hope. I do not know whether marriages are made in Heaven, some people say that they are, but I am almost sure that old maids are. There is a something about them which is not of the earth earthy. They are Spectators of the world, not Adventurers nor Ramblers: perhaps Guardians; we say nothing of Tatlers. They are evidently predestinated to be what they are. They owe not the singularity of their condition to any lack of beauty, wisdom, wit, or good temper; there is no accounting for it but on the principle of fatality. I have known many old maids, and of them all not one that has not possessed as many good and amiable qualities as ninety "and nine out of a hundred of my married acquaintance. Why then are they single?-It is their fate!

On the left hand of the road between London and Liverpool, there is a village, which, for particular reasons, I shall call Littleton: and I will not so far gratify the curiosity of idle inquirers as to say whether it is nearer to London or to Liverpool; but it is a very pretty village, and let the reader keep a sharp look out for it next time he travels that road. It is situated in a valley, through which runs a tiny rivulet as bright as silver, but hardly wide enough for a trout to turn round in. Over the little stream there is a bridge, which seems to have been built merely out of compliment to the liquid thread, to save it the mortification of being hopped over by every urchin and clod pole in the parish. The church is covered with ivy, even half way up the steeple, but the sexton has removed the green intrusion from the face of the clock, which, with its white surface and black figures, looks at a little distance like an owl in an ivy bush. A little to the left of the church is the parsonage house, almost smothered with honeysuckles: in front of the house is a grass plot,

* From The Englishman's Magazine.' This piece is also given in 'Friendship's Offering for 1833.