AGNES.

PART FIRST.

THE KNIGHT.

THE tale I tell is gospel true,
As all the bookmen know,

And pilgrims who have strayed to view
The wrecks still left to show.

The old, old story, — fair, and young,

And fond, and not too wise,

That matrons tell, with sharpened tongue, To maids with downcast eyes.

Ah! maidens err and matrons warn

Beneath the coldest sky;

Love lurks amid the tasselled corn

As in the bearded rye !

But who would dream our sober sires

Had learned the old world's ways,

And warmed their hearths with lawless fires In Shirley's homespun days?

'Tis like some poet's pictured trance

His idle rhymes recite,

This old New-England-born romance

Of Agnes and the Knight;

Yet, known to all the country round,
Their home is standing still,

Between Wachusett's lonely mound
And Shawmut's threefold hill.

One hour we rumble on the rail,

One half-hour guide the rein,

We reach at last, o'er hill and dale,

The village on the plain.

With blackening wall and mossy roof,
With stained and warping floor,
A stately mansion stands aloof

And bars its haughty door.

And lo! with arches opening wide,
Sir Harry Frankland's hall!

"T was in the second George's day They sought the forest shade,

The knotted trunks they cleared away, The massive beams they laid,

They piled the rock-hewn chimney tall, They smoothed the terraced ground, They reared the marble-pillared wall That fenced the mansion round.

Far stretched beyond the village bound The Master's broad domain ;

With page and valet, horse and hound,

He kept a goodly train.

And, all the midland county through,
The ploughman stopped to gaze
Whene'er his chariot swept in view

Behind the shining bays,