“No other woman will I wed
Than her whom I adore;
For if I do I needs must burn
In hell for evermore.”
“Why talk you of the flames of hell,
Which you did ne’er assay?
Think rather of my cherry lips,
Which smile on you alway.”
“Your cherry lips avail me nought:
I loathe them from my heart!
In the name of all women’s honour, I pray
You’ll give me leave to part.”
“You ask my leave to go, Sir Knight,
But that I may not give.
Stay with me yet, Tannhäuser dear,
And love the while you live.”
“My life is sick and loathsome grown,
I can no longer stay;
Fair ladye, give me leave to go
From your beauty far away.”
“Nay, speak not thus, my noble lord,
Your senses are not right;
Into my secret chamber come
And taste of love’s delight.”
“Your love to me is hateful grown;
I feel within my soul,
Venus, noble ladye fair,
You are a fiend full foul.”
“Alas! how can you speak such words,—
So sorely lightly me;
Now if you still remain with us
I shall revenged be.
“And if you yet will take your leave,
Of old men ask the same;
And still, I think, where’er you go,
You needs must praise my name.”
Tannhäuser, Venus’ mountain left,
In sorrow and repentance;
“I’ll go to the holy city, Rome,
From the Pope to hear my sentence.
“And joyfully I’ll tread the path
To learn God’s holy will,
And hear from Pope Urbanus’ lips
If he can save me still.—
“Urbanus, holy father mine,
My sins I sorely rue,
The which I grievously did act,
As I’ll confess to you.
“One whole long year I did abide
With Venus fair to see;
Let me confess, and penance do,
That I God’s face may see.”
The Pope bore in his hand a staff,
Carved from a wither’d tree,
“When this dry wood shall bud and bloom,
May thy sins forgiven be.”
“O, welcome back, Tannhäuser dear,
I’ve grieved for you full sore;
But now, my faithful, lovely knight,
You’ll part from me no more.”
“O, had I but one year to live,
But one year free from sin,
The sorest penance I would do
God’s mercy for to win.”
Full sadly then he left the town,
I wis his heart was sore:
“Mary, mother, maiden pure,
Shall I see thee never more?
“Into the mountain I’ll return,
Eternally to live
With my sweet ladye, Venus bright,
Since God will not forgive.”
Meanwhile at Rome, in three days’ time,
The staff began to sprout,
And messengers were sent abroad
To seek Tannhäuser out.
But to the mountain he’d return’d,
And lies imprison’d there,
Until the day of judgment, when
God will his doom declare.
No priest should ever dare withhold
From men the hope of heaven;
They who repent, and penance do,
Their sins shall be forgiven.
COTTON AND THE COTTON-SUPPLY.
PART I.
I fear we must all confess that the present—and chiefly so as regards Great Britain—is a mixed age of cotton and of iron. And this pair, apparently so uncongenial, work together on terms of vast mutual advantage. They are excellent co-partners. Of the two, perhaps, cotton may be said, in some sense, to have the ascendancy, inasmuch as iron, with all its rigidity of temper and hardness of heart, is made to bend to the needs and demands of its associate, whom it educates and conducts through the multiform stages of its career, and finally transmits to its local destination. In fact, much of its employment is in subserviency to the destiny of cotton. It is instrumental to its eminent success, and most complacent in discharging numerous offices of assistance; and in so far as the principal for whom the agent acts is always in this world the bigger of the two, cotton must be deemed a gentleman of superior consideration to iron. Then its direct influence on the creation of wealth is greater and more expansive.
Nevertheless, the affairs of this life are so linked together by a law of reciprocity, that it is impossible to determine the measure of those results which cotton would have attained, deprived of the auxiliary appliances into which iron has been converted. To say nothing of the immense facility which mechanical apparatuses have imparted to the production of cotton-yarn and cotton goods in their many diverse forms, the means of distribution afforded by the wonderful inventions of the age have accelerated incalculably the progress of the manufacture through the marts of the world. Till the time of George III., goods sent forth from Manchester to their several markets throughout England were carried on pack-horses at a speed averaging about four miles an hour. This, compared with their present journey over the whole world, by steamships and railway-conveyance, at the speed of twelve and twenty miles respectively in the same space of time, shows us at once that the uses to which iron has been put in promoting the cause of cotton are of a character it is hardly possible to over-estimate. The reflex action of