it as few prisoners have done. Many a good book has been written in
a dungeon--'Don Quixote,' the 'Pilgrim's Progress': beautiful each
in its way, and destined to immortality: Raleigh begins the 'History
of the World,' the most God-fearing and God-seeing history which I
know of among English writings; though blotted by flattery of James
in the preface: wrong: but pardonable in a man trying in the Tower
to get out of that doleful prison. But all his writings are thirty
years too late; they express the creed of a buried generation, of the
men who defied Spain in the name of a God of righteousness,--not of
men who cringe before her in the name of a God of power and cunning.
The captive eagle has written with a quill from his own wing--a quill
which has been wont ere now to soar to heaven. Every line smacks of
the memories of Nombre and of Zutphen, of Tilbury Fort and of Calais
Roads; and many a gray-headed veteran, as he read them, must have
turned away his face to hide the noble tears, as Ulysses from
Demodocus when he sang the song of Troy. So there sits Raleigh, like
the prophet of old, in his lonely tower above the Thames, watching
the darkness gather upon the land year by year, 'like the morning
spread over the mountains,' the darkness which comes before the dawn
of the Day of The Lord; which he shall never see on earth, though it
be very near at hand; and asks of each newcomer, 'Watchman, what of
the night?'

But there is one bright point at least in the darkness; one on whom
Raleigh's eyes, and those of all England, are fixed in boundless
hope; one who, by the sympathy which attracts all noble natures to
each other, clings to the hero utterly; Henry, the Crown Prince. 'No
king but my father would keep such a bird in a cage.' The noble lad
tries to open the door for the captive eagle; but in vain. At least
he will make what use he can of his wisdom. He asks him for advice