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His Evil Genius stand, arrayed

In all the deepened horrors of the shade;
When Richard viewed in his wild dream, aghast,
The avenging manes of his house approach,
Amidst the standards, to his tortured couch,
Curse him, and cry: This night shall be thy last!

Napoleon watched, in silence and alone,
With stooping head above the map whereon
His failing glance was bent-

Three warriors, sisters three, stood sudden in his tent!

Poor, and without an ornament, but fair

In her high deeds, the First,* with haughty glance,
Looked like a Roman virgin, with the trace
Of bronzing climates mantling on her face,
And a fresh wreath of oak-leaves in her hair;
She leant upon a banner-staff of France,
One deathless day recalling, while on high
Three hues ran through its folds, with dust besprent,
Blackened by battle's thunders, pierced and rent,
But pierced and rent by Victory!

knew thee, a soldier; now I hail thy crown!
Tabor is of thy festivals, yet she

Stands in the roll of honor after me;

I am her elder sister in renown!

I led thee to the loftiest rank of fame,

Thy guide and guardian; once my spirit spoke
The high heroic words which roused the flame
Of baffled courage in thy wavering warriors,
When death, beholding thee so great,

Rendered an awe-struck homage to thy fate,
Beneath the thunder and the smoke

That wrapt thy charge against Arcola's barriers!

A sceptre to my flag thou couldst prefer-
Vainly, thy star sinks darkling from the sky;
Strength, with no guiding rein, must ever err.
Farewell, thy fortune fails, thy glory is gone by!

The Secondt with the desert palm-trees blent
The trophied spoils at Alexandria won;
The fiery spirit of the sun

Shone in her eyes, heroically bent.

By Conquest armed, and ruddy with the dyes
Of Moslem gore,

Her hand the falchion of the Cæsars bore,
And the old Compass of the Ptolemies!

*The Genius of the Republic, and of the Italian campaign which ended so triumphantly with the treaty of Campo Formio.

The Genius of the Directory and the campaign in Egypt.

I saw thee banished; now I hail thy crown;
Marengo is among thy feasts, yet she
Stands in the roll of honor after me;

I am her elder sister in renown!

I owe that grand celebrity to thee,

Won in the shadows of the Pyramids,
What time the astonished Nile looked out to see
The scattered turbans of the Osmanlie

Sink to the earth before thy rapid steeds,
The Arts, beneath the aegis of thy deeds;
And placed their honored sons, while they*
Interrogated still the ruins gray

Of wondrous Thebes or Memphis in their march:
And if thou went'st astray,—

Like the bright eagle whose ambitions flight
Errs in the blue and boundless arch,-
'Twas in the search of light!

Yet wouldst thou quench that light! in vain, in vain ;
Thy star eclipsed sinks downward from the sky;
Strength is still nerveless when without a rein.
Farewell; thy fortune fails, thy glory is gone by!

The Lastf-oh pity!-iron fetters hung

On her fair arms; her melancholy glance

Was fixed on earth, where many a bloody spot,
Left by her footsteps, marked her slow advance;
Tottering she came, and breathed, with hopeless tongue,
"Dies, but surrenders not.”‡

Ah! not for her the spoil and the array

Of captive standards borne in drooping pomp,
Where Victory blows to Heaven her echoing trump;
Grand marching o'er the loud, triumphal way-
But, sacred to the dead,

The sombre cypress branches lay,

Graceful as laurels, wreathed around her head!

Thou knowest me not, but, as a king no more,
Tremble, and hear; no other day shall be
Found in thy roll of honor after me-
I've had no elder sister heretofore!

* The learned men who accompanied Napoleon's march achieved archæological victories to which his own were worthless and evanescent. They elucidated the antiquities of the East and Egypt in an admirable manner, and their works were published by the French nation for the benefit of the world. These antiquaries were sources of amusement as well as information. They always moved with the baggage, and whenever the Arabs made their attacks, the philosophers and the asses were hurried together into the hollow squares, for safety. Hence a funny classification, very disparaging to these enlightened men. The asses were known by the appellation of savans, too, throughout the army. The Genius of the Hundred Days, and the fatal Belgian campaign.

It was said that, when the Old Guard were summoned to surrender, at Waterloo, after Napoleon's bridle-rein was turned, General Cambronne, their commander, replied: "The Guard dies, but does not surrender!" It is distressing to the poetry of one's nature to say that Cambronne and his men did not die, and did surrender.

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*The people of Spain.

+ Alluding to the advance of the great French army towards Moscow, in 1812.

In every thought, in every clime,
Still present from his exile's depth, and, great
As his reverses, with a port sublime,

Erect upon the ruins of his fate !*

Victory widowed, Europe empty all,

From shock to shock, from fatal fall to fall,

He came to die upon a barren shore;

The great sea round his tomb rolls murmurous evermore ! †

An isle receives him, crownless, lifeless-one
For whom a mighty empire was too narrow;
The grave, to which his kingly hopes are gone,
With him enshrouds a dynasty undone.
The homeward fisherman, at set of sun,
Rests him awhile upon the hero's barrow;
Then, raising up his heavy nets, he goes
Slowly away, treads o'er his last repose,

And ponders on-the business of to-morrow!

* This fine expression is a plagiarism from Seneca's Nihilomenus inter ruinas publicas erectus. The French can now say, with Sganarille, in Le Medecin Malgre Lui: "Nous avons changé tout cela." In 1840, the astute Louis Philippe had the body of Napoleon brought from St. Helena and deposited in the splendid mausoleum of the Madelaine. The French are not a poetical people, after all. They should have left the old soldier, "with his martial cloak around him,"

"To sleep in the vale, by the brook and the willow."

In that place, the drama of his life had its most impressive close and tragic beauty. The moral of his career loses half its eloquence and half its poetry by that transference of his remains. The gray and grand old ocean was a more dignified keeper of them than the city of Paris. These Frenchmen really seem to spoil every thing they try to mend. Neither Republicanism nor the Romance of History has any chance of thriving in their hands. For political reasons, also, Napoleon's ashes should not have been brought into France, to repose among the people he had so loved and so affectionately decimated in his lifetime. These relics of his certainly drew Louis Napoleon after them; and now

"They form, like Guesclin's dust, a talisman”

against the efforts of the French republicans to get rid of him. That people, however, will soon say, as they said in the Hundred Days, "Assez de ce Bonaparte.”

VOL IX. NO. II. NEW SERIES.

10

NARRATIVE

OF THE

LIFE OF GENERAL LESLIE COMBS,

OF KENTUCKY,

EMBRACING INCIDENTS IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE NORTH-WESTERN TERRITORY.

[CONCLUDED.]

young Combs the appointment of Captain of Spies, with the privilege of selecting his company from Colonel Dudley's regiment. He had not expected a position so high or responsible, and felt much diffidence of his ability to discharge its dangerous duties.

The next day, another company was organized in Colonel Boswell's regiment, commanded by an old Indian fighter under Wayne, named Kilbreath; and by way of distinction afterwards, our young volunteer was called the boy captain. Their pay was thirty dollars per month extra; and he had no difficulty, therefore, in filling his company with active, gallant riflemen, but one or two of whom, however, had seen service.

THE defeat at Raisin, and the discharge of the remainder of the Kentucky troops, made the situation of General Harrison, and the whole north-western frontier, extremely critical. Of our old forts there remained in our possession Forts Wayne and Harrison. Fort Winchester had been erected on the site of old Fort Defiance, and General Harrison had built Fort Meigs at the foot of the Maumee Rapids, on the south side of the river. The latter was the only place at all prepared for an attack by heavy artillery; and it was to be expected that as soon as the ice on the lake and river broke up in the spring, the British, having command on the waters and entire possession of Michigan Territory, would assail that position. It was of the first importance, therefore, to have General Harrison When they reached St. Mary's Blockreenforced as soon as possible, for the fall of house, General Clay divided his brigade, Fort Meigs would expose the whole north-sending Colonel Dudley's regiment across to western frontier to fire and desolation. For the Auglaise river, and descending the St. this purpose, General Green Clay marched Mary's himself, with Colonel Boswell's, infrom Kentucky, early in April, with two regi- tending to unite them again at old Fort Defiments of volunteers, taking the same route ance. Captain Combs was attached to the which General Winchester had done. Hav- former; and on their march down the Auing made the necessary preparations, Combs glaise, an express reached them from Fort started himself soon afterwards to rejoin Meigs, with the intelligence that General General Harrison at Fort Meigs, as he had Harrison was in daily expectation of an atpromised to do, and overtook General Clay tack, and urging them to proceed with all at Dayton. Totally unprovided as that gen- possible dispatch. Colonel Dudley immeeral was with maps of the vast wilderness diately summoned a council of officers to meet into which he was about to plunge, the prac- at his quarters, where it was unanimously tical information which young Combs had resolved that General Harrison ought to be obtained on the previous campaign, as to the apprised of their approach, and his orders, as geography of the country, its watercourses, to the time and manner, received. How this newly cut roads, Indian villages, &c., &c., was to be accomplished was then the queswas deemed of much importance; and before tion. It was fifty miles from Fort Defiance, the expedition reached Piqua, he tendered where they expected to meet General Clay,

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