brooding over a too-agitating past, while "that way madness lies:" thus she recals her first days of wedded life in Flanders—the three months at Windsor, fêted there "by a monarch styled the Seventh Henry"—and the distracting time when, a forsaken and abused wife, she "traversed land and sea to find—to find—a Flemish wanton snaring Philip's soul with golden tresses,"—and the dark hour when she plucked his corpse from the grave itself, refusing to believe in death where he, her soul's darling, was concerned; and how, by a rare device, she arrayed the dead man, not dead to her, in pompous robes, meet for life in the fulness of life's pride and might, and hid him from all eyes but her own, and carried him by night to Granada—
How, through each day encamp'd,
I curtain'd him, and bore him on by night,
Loathing all roofs, that I might laugh at those
Who watch'd his waking. 'Tis a dismal journey—
The torches flicker through its mists—the sleet
Descends to quench them—I'll not track it on—
so brokenly discourses the distraught queen, on whose wakened spirit Padilla has staked all—
His life, his honour, his dear country's peace—
gracing with her title the wild tumults of the crowd, and with it aiming to "make rebellion consecrate"—resolved, too, "while a thread of consciousness within her soul can shape a mandate," to honour it "as law, announced by voice of angel." That spell is soon broken, that charm soon spent. Giron, a rival of Padilla, secures the person of the queen, usurps the command of the insurgents, and involves them, and their cause, in utter confusion. The Regent triumphs, seizes many a noble prisoner, one of them Padilla's only son, and issues an offer
Of pardon at the will of him who gives
Padilla to the axe—
and of this offer the father takes advantage to disguise himself, promise the betrayal of the "arch-rebel," procure the enfranchisement of his boy and the forgiveness of Toledo, and then doff the monkish wrappings and stand forth to die, strong in integrity of purpose and assurance of faith. The same mellow even-tide light suffuses the catastrophe as does that of "Ion"—of a calm beauty too refined and a "dainty sweet" not to tell in every line of poetical license—but with a softening influence and divine melancholy peculiar to itself. There is nearly the same liberal presence of florid diction, and picturesque description, and glittering imagery, in this as in Talfourd's earlier tragedies. Take an example or two. Of Padilla's trusty old steward, seen in the garden at sunset, an approaching visitor says—
What! vegetating still with ruddy cheek
As twenty summers since—like yonder dial
O'ergrown by the huge sycamore, that, touch'd
No longer by the sunbeam, shows no trace
Of coursing time?
The conceit is pretty of its kind, but it is hardly the sort of fancy that would occur to the visitor; it is rather the simile of a poet in his study,
