Nay, not the only one,—­for one visible record of her, at least, the soil of France cherishes among its chiefest treasures.  When the Paris butterflies flutter for a summer day to the decaying watering-place of Dieppe, some American wanderer, who flutters with them, may cast perchance a longing eye to where the hamlet of Eu stands amid its verdant meadows, two miles away, still lovely as when the Archbishop Laurent chose it out of all the world for his “place of eternal rest,” six centuries ago.  But it is not for its memories of priestly tombs and miracles that the summer visitor seeks it now, nor because the savant loves its ancient sea-margin or its Roman remains; nor is it because the little Bresle winds gracefully through its soft bed, beneath forests green in the sunshine, glorious in the gloom; it is not for the memories of Rollo and William the Conqueror, which fill with visionary shapes, grander than the living, the corridors of its half-desolate chateau.  It is because these storied walls, often ruined, often rebuilt, still shelter a gallery of historic portraits such as the world cannot equal; there is not a Bourbon king, nor a Bourbon battle, nor one great name among the courtier contemporaries of Bourbons, that is not represented there; the “Hall of the Guises” contains kindred faces, from all the realms of Christendom; the “Salon des Rois” holds Joan of Arc, sculptured in marble by the hand of a princess; in the drawing-room, Pere la Chaise and Marion de l’Orme are side by side, and the angelic beauty of Agnes Sorel floods the great hall with light, like a sunbeam; and in this priceless treasure-house, worth more to France than almost fair Normandy itself, this gallery of glory, first arranged at Choisy, then transferred hither to console the solitude of a weeping woman, the wanderer finds the only remaining memorial of La Grande Mademoiselle.

THE SWAN-SONG OF PARSON AVERY.
1635.

When the reaper’s task was ended, and the summer wearing late, Parson Avery sailed from Newbury with his wife and children eight, Dropping down the river harbor in the shallop Watch and Wait.

Pleasantly lay the clearings in the mellow summer-morn, And the newly-planted orchards dropping their fruits first-born, And the homesteads like brown islands amidst a sea of corn.

Broad meadows reaching seaward the tided creeks between,
And hills rolled, wave-like, inland, with oaks and walnuts green: 
A fairer home, a goodlier land, his eye had never seen.

Yet away sailed Parson Avery, away where duty led,
And the voice of God seemed calling, to break the living bread
To the souls of fishers starving on the rocks of Marblehead!

All day they sailed:  at nightfall the pleasant land-breeze died,
The blackening sky at midnight its starry lights denied,
And, far and low, the thunder of tempest prophesied.

Blotted out was all the coast-line, gone were rock and wood and sand;
Grimly anxious stood the helmsman with the tiller in his hand,
And questioned of the darkness what was sea and what was land.