"Who told me she was false and fleeting,
        Changeful, cruel, cold and kind?
      Methinks she is the sweetest sweeting
        Ever wilful man could find:
                       I love her us my life!
      Lay thy lips upon my lips—-
      Cool, dewy-fresh as daisy tips,
                         With honey'd softness rife!

      "From thy kiss new life came stealing
        Through my chill'd and fainting soul:
      It hath been a dear revealing,
        That thou givest nobly dole
                        Of thy young maiden love
      To every idle, passing whim;
      Thou art pure us thou dost seem,
                        And true as God above!"

      Death and Lady Claire sit watching,
        Many days within that room;
      Every changed expression catching,
        She in faith, and he in gloom,
                        That flits o'er Bertram's face:
      Through the long and ghastly midnight,
      Through the dim and haunted twilight
                          Of that deserted place.

      Comes across the hills a moaning,
        As of rising western breeze;
      Comes a heavy rain at gloaming
        O'er the long becalmed seas—-
                          A cold and healthy breath.
      He sinks into a quiet rest,
      Dreaming of her who loves him best,
                           For him had dared her death!

                                IV.

      Through the wood-walks, o'er the meadows,
        Swells a full and gladsome chime;
      In her chamber's perfumed shadows,
        All that blithe and happy time,
                      Stays Lady Madeline:
      She is sick, and grieved and wrathful;
      Sore at heart, yet proud and scornful,
                      As ever she hath been.

      Yet seems she gay: she hath been singing
        An ancient song of love and hate,
      But, through all, that tuneful ringing
        Smites her like a lonesome fate,
                     Saying, "He loveth Claire;
      Thou art forgot, he heeds thee not;
      He weddeth Claire, thou art forgot—-
                     He loveth Lady Claire!"

      She sees the maidens scatter flowers
        Before the gentle, modest bride;
      She notes the stately form that towers,
        So grand, yet loving, at her side,
                      Then weeps with rage and shame;
      "0, they will laugh my love to scorn!
       I would that I had ne'er been born,
                      Or died ere Bertram came!"

                                V.

      In cloister dim dwells Madeline,
        Chafing and fretful, never still;
      With robe of serge for silken sheen;
        With cross, and coif, and gloomy veil;
                     Wearing her soul away.
      With weak repining, weaker tears,
      Go on her clouded, sinful years,
                     From weary day to day!

       In Harden Hall dwells Lady Claire,
        With frolic children round her knee;
      Still meek her face, and still most fair,
        From every shade of sorrow free;
                       A true and tender wife,
      Worn in her husband's inner heart,
      Its kindest, dearest, holiest part,
                       His very life of life!

                ECONOMIC BOTANY.

BREAKING the ice is a favourite expression,
applicable both to national progress in
general, and to the state of advancement of
any particular branch of practical knowledge.
Thus, in Turkey —- to take first the case of a
nation —- the ice is not yet broken, as far as
civilising improvement is concerned, so long
as women are precluded from giving it a
helping hand, and so long as the common
people stoutly believe that those unclean
packs of Christian dogs the allied armies of
England and France were compelled to
come and fight the Russians, because the
Commander of the Faithful, the Sultan,
ordered them, as tributaries and vassals, to
do so. To instance next the case of a science,
in Economic Botany, that is botany applied to
household service, the ice was not yet broken
when the origin of valuable spices and drugs
was as mysteriously shrouded as the site of
the gardens of the Hesperides; when truth
and error were so closely dovetailed that it
was difficult to detect their line of junction;
when Sierra Leone —- a country so fertile
that oranges, figs, and citrons grew almost
without any culture—- produced also the
oyster-tree, which bears no other fruit but
oysters, though it has a very broad leaf almost
as thick as leather, having small knobs like
those of the cypress. The boughs hang a
good way into the water, and are overflowed
by the tide; on the mud and slush that sticks
to them, the young oysters bred there fasten,
and that in such vast numbers that one can
hardly see anything almost but long ropes of
oysters. A mangrove brought home, then,
and kept in a hothouse, might have been expected
to bear a crop of shell-fish. The ice
was not broken when camphor was thought
to be a mineral, and was learnedly styled by
Kentman, "bitumen odoratum;" when
Cimbulon Island produced a tree whose leaves,
as soon as they fell to the ground, moved
from place to place as if they were alive
(which those leaf-animals really were), springing
away when touched, and surviving for
eight days kept in a desk; when a poor innocent
fern with a woolly rhizoma (something
like the hare's-foot fern on a large scale), was
calumniated as a Boranez or Scythian
lamb-plant, "because it resembles a lamb in shape,
and consumes the herbs within its reach, and
as far as the stalk reaches; it changes its
place in growing, and wheresoever it turns
the grass withers." While double coconuts
were believed to grow in submarine palm