s born, for holier hymning lulled his brain;
Very wild his agony; very; but between its bars his eyes
Saw the angels as they wandered on the walls of Paradise.

Faint and fainter grew he, while the melody loud and louder rang,
Till it seemed not only Gwineth but a myriad angels sang;
And his soul seemed rising, rising, rising from his pallid clay,
Which, each moment, grew more feeble--faintlier wrestling with decay.

Burst upon his ears one swell! it seemed an anthem of the spheres,
Jubilant, divinely ringing; swam his eyes with happy tears--
"Come, forgiven one," the cadence, "chastened spirit, come, arise
From thine earthly prison-house to holy homes beyond the skies."

Fainter, fainter, still more feeble, grew the sufferer as he heard,
And a sigh swooned on the silence, soft as breathing of a bird,--
And all was over. In his trance his spirit's sparkling feet had trod
The realms of space, and gone from earth, through air, to judgment and
to God.

NOTES.

The judgment of the _peine forte et dure_, on an instance of which our
ballad is founded, was well known in the ancient law of England. As
has been seen, it was terribly severe. The circumstances of the
judgment were as follows: When a prisoner stood charged with an
offence, and an indictment had been found against him, before he could
be tried he was called upon to answer, or, in technical parlance, to
plead. A plea in bar is an answer, either affirming or denying the
offence charged in the indictment, or, if of a dilatory character,
showing some ground why the defendant should not be called upon to
answer at all. In those days, in all capital cases, the estates of the
criminal, on conviction and judgment, were forfeited to the crown. The
blood of the offender was considered as corrupted, and, as a
consequence, his property could not pass to his family, who, although
innocent, suffered for the faults of the criminal. Crimes, therefore,
where the punishment fell, not only on the criminal but on his family,
were comparatively of rare occurrence. An admission of guilt produced
the same effect as a conviction. If the defendant, however, stood
mute, obstinately refusing to answer, by which behaviour he preserved
his estates to his family, he was sentenced to undergo the judgment of
the _peine forte et dure_.

"The English judgment of penance for standing mute," says Chief
Justice Blackstone, in his admirable Commentaries, "was as follows:
That the p