"Long live our King Franz Joseph! Live the noble Magyar band! Long live the laws and customs of the freed Hungarian land!”

And the Kaiser looked right proudly on his ranks of loyal men,
All his in life or death all his! and his heart's vow rose again:
Ah, blessed God! on the golden sands of hours so proud and high
Did no shadow fall of a clanking chain and a captive's hopeless sigh?

Ten days - but ten - another scene - the glare of a tropic sky;
A pallid, worn, but princely form, dragged forth at noon to die.
"Muerte!" from the hellish throats of a base, ignoble crew,
Through the purpling bloom of Aztec land the savage death-cry flew.

"Muerte!" what is death to him who has felt the clinging shame,
The loss of kingdom and of crown, fate's spite to an ancient name?
Howl on, O wild demoniac chant! the agony was o'er,

When a knightly faith in peoples' truth was lost forevermore.

The Kaiser's glance from the sacred mound looked forth from his brother's eyes,

But a nobler king looked up that day to blue remorseless skies.
One bore St. Stephen's sacred sword, his gem-wrought diadem,
Guarded and girt from scathe or hurt by the hearts of loyal men.

The other, in his martyr's crown, had his guard of honor too;
His stainless fame, his knightly truth kept vigil firm and true.
He looked not at the hostile crowd, but his thoughts went out afar,

To poor Carlotta's wild despair, in the peaceful Miramar.

But the blighted hopes and blood-hounds' yell, the sorrow, pain, and dearth,
Blenched not the lordliest glance that took its last farewell of earth.

The angels know how the heart was wrung, for love must claim its own,
But the foeman saw on the kingly brow no trace of the hidden moan.

A sudden flash! ah, salvo meet when a noble soul is borne
From pain and shrift of martyr's stake to the foot of the golden throne:
O gracious God! must it ever be the blood-curse is in vain?
Men look at its scathing, blasting tide, like drops of summer rain.

We turn from wastes of stern despair to that tragic Aztec clime:
Again the accursed might of wrong comes down to this modern time;
We shed no tears for the murdered king, but raise our hands on high,
And swear the death of gallant knight is bliss to a captive's sigh.

THE LAST WILD FLOWER.

Down in sheltered hollows, or by hillsides, blooms, from November to the first severe cold of December, the last wild flower of our Louisiana forest the saponaria or gentian.

There can be nothing more exquisite than the clear sapphire of these fairy bells, rising from the sombre brown of dead grass and faded leaves. So bright, so intense in hue, that it needs little stretch of imagination to fancy them flakes of the clear blue sky fallen on earth. We have seen them, when the winter has been early, rising from snow-drifts, their tender, delicate corolla peering above the wintry shroud, a very eye of hope, shining with brighter and purer lustre through the chill and gloom of earth.

Flowers sometimes read us a lesson that needs no headings to make it comprehensible to our hearts, for its text was written in the garden of Eden; but in the flush of spring, the plenty and gorgeousness of summer, this lesson is incomplete. Its highest moral reaches us through the storms and darkness of winter, when we shrink and shiver in cutting blasts, which seem to give fresh vitality to some of the frailest and most delicate creations on God's earth. The idea of an Omnipresent protection, adjusting itself to every need, somehow presents itself to the mind, and we shelter and nestle under the very thought.

The gentian, too, always a favorite, is now to us a reminiscence of an event which, two winters ago, made us very sad.

In journeying to and fro across the Sabine, one cold day in December, we met on its banks, at Burr's Ferry, a refugee train, which, like ourself, was detained on the Louisiana side until some repairs had been made on the ferry-boat, to enable us to make the “traverse" with safety in that tempestuous weather. Any one who has ever crossed the Sabine in wind and storm knows well what a dreary, desolate, dangerous crossing it is. Primitive enough, too, with its ropes stretched from bank to bank, by which the ferryman steadies his boat and shapes its course. Should it break, down would sweep the frail craft into the wild reaches of the river, and, nine chances to ten, either upset or sink there.

A common danger establishes an immediate sympathy between utter strangers, and by the time the leaky ferry-boat was ready for its first load we knew the names, the hopes, the fears of the whole party, and even their destination. We entered, too, with the liveliest interest into the solicitude of an aged couple for the comfort of their invalid daughter- an only child. She was a beautiful girl of about seventeen or eighteen, and one glance at her pallid, sharpened features, told us that she was nearer the end of her last journey than her devoted parents seemed to realize. We had heard of her before,-"the Lily of A-," as she was called,- heard of her beauty,

accomplishments, and wealth, and we listened with profound compassion to the tale told by one of her friends -a tale which showed how little all the rich gifts of nature or fortune had availed to shield her from that common lot of humanity — sorrow.

We have no time or space to dwell on particulars. Like many others in Louisiana, where the war was carried on in the very yards or parks of the planters, she had seen her lover, the gallant Captain F, fall in a skirmish not ten paces from her door.

The shock, coming upon a constitution more than delicate, had hastened its decay, and the Lily of A- faded slowly beneath one of those inscrutable

maladies that have hitherto perplexed and baffled all medical skill.

More from the restless fancy of an invalid than from any fear of an invading army, she had persuaded her parents to join the refugees from the neighborhood, and they were now en route for Mexico.

She was made as comfortable on the leaky boat as circumstances would admit, but the waves dashed over the low sides and saturated her wrappings. In moving her hand restlessly over the side of the boat, a handsome emerald ring dropped into the river. She held up her hand with a faint smile. "All," she said; "I might have made this sacrifice to destiny with a better grace some years ago. It was exceeding happiness that always sought to propitiate fate; but I gave up my treasures long since." And she shivered and complained of the piercing cold as a wave, larger than the rest, swept over the boat, almost swamping it.

With difficulty we reached the other side, and warming ourselves by a large fire built by some German emigrants who were camped on the bank, we then made preparations to pass the night in an uninhabited hut by the roadside. A large fire was kindled on the hearth, blankets hung against the walls to keep out the wind, and every means in our power used to shield the invalid at least from exposure. But she insisted on lying near the open door, gazing across the swollen, turbid stream at the gloomy pine-forest on the Louisiana side. Her large, sad eyes filled by degrees with tears, but by a strong effort she kept them back, and gently but firmly resisted all her parents' entreaties to be moved from her exposed situation.

"Let me look a little longer," she pleaded; "remember, I may never see it again. Do you know, I understand now those Polish exiles near Awho had brought a little piece of their native soil to lay over their hearts when they died. Pour avoir encore des reves de la patrie, they said. Dear Louisiana, I never knew before how I loved you." And she lay back exhausted for some moments.

Suddenly her eyes were attracted by a flower growing on the sloping bank near the water's edge. "Get it for me," she cried, eagerly. We plucked it, a long, beautiful spray of gentian, and laid it in her hand.

"How beautiful! how more than beautiful!" she murmured; "so triumphant over blight, decay, and even death itself; so redolent of hope and pro

mise; so full, too, of the old happy time." And she pressed it passionately to her lips with low, indistinct murmurs.

"Mamma” — turning to her mother—“do you remember the little tuft of gentian near the summer-house at Bienvenue, how it blossomed through the frost; and when a heavy fall of snow at last destroyed it, the blue of the petals was as bright, its texture as silky as if living and growing? Beautiful Bienvenue! I almost wish I had not left it. Do you think the orange-tree at my window is dead to-day, for this is a piercing wind?" Her mother turned aside, almost unable to answer.

"Thank you," she said to us, "for the gentian. Flowers are my passion, and this one, coming to me to-day, amid all this dreariness, seems to have brought back the blue sky, hidden by those heavy storm-clouds.”

As night came on, shiverings, and at last delirium, seemed to point to a speedy termination of the young life that was now visibly ebbing fast away in that lonely log hut on the Sabine. Dumb and paralyzed by their crushing grief, the parents sat beside her, while pitying friends employed themselves in kind offices. The dying girl seemed unconscious of all her surroundings; she was once more in her Louisiana home, babbling of the flowers she had loved and tended, and of the little gentian by the summer-house. No sad or troubled memory seemed to intrude on her peaceful, happy visions. The dead might have been with her, but they were once more living and loving.

From the tents of the German emigrants near, at times swelled up some song or chant, which seemed to harmonize with the sick girl's dreams, for she would smile faintly and listen. The deep, mellow voices at last struck into that saddest of all sad melodies "Die langen, langen Tag."

Some memory must have been evoked from the profound depths of that wail of a breaking heart, for she moved restlessly, and whispered, “My lone watch-keeping." But in a second the peaceful look came back, and half raising the gentian she still held convulsively in her hand, the broken Lily of A- was among the fadeless flowers of the Eternal River.

Thence comes it that the gentian, to us, is full of hope and memory.

THIS

ANNA PEYRE DINNIES.

HIS accomplished daughter of the South, known so long as a poet by the sweet, wild title of "Moïna," was born in Georgetown, South Carolina.

Her father, W. F. Shackelford, an eminent lawyer of that State, removed, with his youthful daughter, from that city to Charleston, where he placed her under the care of the Misses Ramsay, daughters of the celebrated Dr. D. Ramsay. Inheriting from her father a talent for poetry and a delicacy of taste, she also received from him the encouragement of her youthful genius, and the development of her refined and graceful word-painting.

At the early age of fourteen, her young heart was given to J. C. Dinnies, a gentleman of New York, but then settled in St. Louis, Mo., and, preferring the white flowers of true affection and manly worth to the lonely laurel crown, "Moïna " encircled her fair brow with an orange wreath, and her young life with a true, devoted love.

Though married to one capable of monopolizing all her thoughts and worthy of all her young heart's devotion, still, in her hours of leisure, Mrs. Dinnies found a delight in expressing in words the deep feelings of happiness that welled up from her poetic soul; and sweet as the notes of a happy bird were the songs which issued from the serene and quiet home of the youthful poet-wife.

Many of her published pieces were written before her marriage, though they still hold a high and honored place in American literature. The history of the "Charnel Ship" has been read and admired by youthful hearts and sober heads; yet few dreamed that a child had penned those thrilling words "which filled each heart with fear."

A number of Mrs. Dinnies's most valuable manuscripts were destroyed by fire in St. Louis-among them a long poem, nearly finished, in six cantos, and several tales ready for publication; but too happy to write for fame, and only caring to speak in song when feeling prompted

* Mrs. Dinnies adopted the signature of "Moïna" when quite young. Since the close of the war, Reverend Father Ryan, author of "The Conquered Banner," and other poems, has used the same pseudonym.