ON A soft sunny morning in the genial month of May, I made anexcursion to Windsor Castle. It is a place full of storied andpoetical associations. The very external aspect of the proud oldpile is enough to inspire high thought. It rears its irregular wallsand massive towers, like a mural crown, round the brow of a loftyridge, waves its royal banner in the clouds, and looks down, with alordly air, upon the surrounding world.

On this morning the weather was of that voluptuous vernal kind,which calls forth all the latent romance of a man's temperament,filling his mind with music, and disposing him to quote poetry anddream of beauty. In wandering through the magnificent saloons and longechoing galleries of the castle, I passed with indifference by wholerows of portraits of warriors and statesmen, but lingered in thechamber, where hang the likenesses of the beauties which graced thegay court of Charles the Second; and as I gazed upon them, depictedwith amorous, half-dishevelled tresses, and the sleepy eye of love,I blessed the pencil of Sir Peter Lely, which had thus enabled me tobask in the reflected rays of beauty. In traversing also the "largegreen courts," with sunshine beaming on the gray walls, and glancingalong the velvet turf, my mind was engrossed with the image of thetender, the gallant, but hapless Surrey, and his account of hisloiterings about them in his stripling days, when enamored of the LadyGeraldine-"With eyes cast up unto the maiden's tower,With easie sighs, such as men draw in love."In this mood of mere poetical susceptibility, I visited the ancientKeep of the Castle, where James the First of Scotland, the pride andtheme of Scottish poets and historians, was for many years of hisyouth detained a prisoner of state. It is a large gray tower, that hasstood the brunt of ages, and is still in good preservation. Itstands on a mound, which elevates it above the other parts of thecastle, and a great flight of steps leads to the interior. In thearmory, a Gothic hall, furnished with weapons of various kinds andages, I was shown a coat of armor hanging against the wall, whichhad once belonged to James. Hence I was conducted up a staircase toa suite of apartments of faded magnificence, hung with storiedtapestry, which formed his prison, and the scene of that passionateand fanciful amour, which has woven into the web of his story themagical hues of poetry and fiction.

The whole history of this amiable but unfortunate prince is highlyromantic. At the tender age of eleven he was sent from home by hisfather, Robert III., and destined for the French court, to be rearedunder the eye of the French monarch, secure from the treachery anddanger that surrounded the royal house of Scotland. It was hismishap in the course of his voyage to fall into the hands of theEnglish, and he was detained prisoner by Henry IV., notwithstandingthat a truce existed between the two countries.

The intelligence of his capture, coming in the train of many sorrowsand disasters, proved fatal to his unhappy father. "The news," weare told, "was brought to him while at supper, and did so overwhelmhim with grief, that he was almost ready to give up the ghost into thehands of the servant that attended him. But being carried to hisbed-chamber, he abstained from all food, and in three days died ofhunger and grief at Rothesay."** Buchanan.

James was detained in captivity about eighteen years; but thoughdeprived of personal liberty, he was treated with the respect due tohis rank. Care was taken to instruct him in all the branches of usefulknowledge cultivated at that period, and to give him those mentaland personal accomplishments deemed proper for a prince. Perhaps, inthis respect, his imprisonment was an advantage, as it enabled himto apply himself the more exclusively to his improvement, andquietly to imbibe that rich fund of knowledge, and to cherish thoseelegant tastes, which have given such a lustre to his memory. Thepicture drawn of him in early life, by the Scottish historians, ishighly captivating, and seems rather the description of a hero ofromance, than of a character in real history. He was well learnt, weare told, "to fight with the sword, to joust, to tournay, towrestle, to sing and dance; he was an expert mediciner, right craftyin playing both of lute and harp, and sundry other instruments ofmusic, and was expert in grammar, oratory, and poetry."** Translation of Hector Boyce.

With this combination of manly and delicate accomplishments, fittinghim to shine both in active and elegant life, and calculated to givehim an intense relish for joyous existence, it must have been a severetrial, in an age of bustle and chivalry, to pass the spring-time ofhis years in monotonous captivity. It was the good fortune of James,however, to be gifted with a powerful poetic fancy, and to bevisited in his prison by the choicest inspirations of the muse. Someminds corrode and grow inactive, under the loss of personal liberty;others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poetto become tender and imaginative in the loneliness of confinement.

He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like thecaptive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.

Have you not seen the nightingale,

A pilgrim coop'd into a cage,

How doth she chant her wonted tale,

In that her lonely hermitage!

Even there her charming melody doth proveThat all her boughs are trees, her cage a grove.** Roger L'Estrange.

Indeed, it is the divine attribute of the imagination, that it isirrepressible, unconfinable; that when the real world is shut out,it can create a world for itself, and with a necromantic power, canconjure up glorious shapes and forms, and brilliant visions, to makesolitude populous, and irradiate the gloom of the dungeon. Such wasthe world of pomp and pageant that lived round Tasso in his dismalcell at Ferrara, when he conceived the splendid scenes of hisJerusalem; and we may consider the "King's Quair," composed byJames, during his captivity at Windsor, as another of thosebeautiful breakings-forth of the soul from the restraint and gloomof the prison house.

The subject of the poem is his love for the Lady Jane Beaufort,daughter of the Earl of Somerset, and a princess of the blood royal ofEngland, of whom he became enamored in the course of his captivity.

What gives it a peculiar value, is that it may be considered atranscript of the royal bard's true feelings, and the story of hisreal loves and fortunes. It is not often that sovereigns write poetry,or that poets deal in fact. It is gratifying to the pride of acommon man, to find a monarch thus suing, as it were, for admissioninto his closet, and seeking to win his favor by administering tohis pleasures. It is a proof of the honest equality of intellectualcompetition, which strips off all the trappings of factitious dignity,brings the candidate down to a level with his fellow-men, andobliges him to depend on his own native powers for distinction. Itis curious, too, to get at the history of a monarch's heart, and tofind the simple affections of human nature throbbing under the ermine.

But James had learnt to be a poet before he was a king: he wasschooled in adversity, and reared in the company of his ownthoughts. Monarchs have seldom time to parley with their hearts, or tomeditate their minds into poetry; and had James been brought up amidstthe adulation and gayety of a court, we should never, in allprobability, have had such a poem as the Quair.

I have been particularly interested by those parts of the poem whichbreathe his immediate thoughts concerning his situation, or whichare connected with the apartment in the tower. They have thus apersonal and local charm, and are given with such circumstantialtruth, as to make the reader present with the captive in his prison,and the companion of his meditations.

Such is the account which he gives of his weariness of spirit, andof the incident which first suggested the idea of writing the poem. Itwas the still midwatch of a clear moonlight night; the stars, he says,were twinkling as fire in the high vault of heaven: and "Cynthiarinsing her golden locks in Aquarius." He lay in bed wakeful andrestless, and took a book to beguile the tedious hours. The book hechose was Boetius' Consolations of Philosophy, a work popular amongthe writers of that day, and which had been translated by his greatprototype Chaucer. From the high eulogium in which he indulges, itis evident this was one of his favorite volumes while in prison: andindeed it is an admirable text-book for meditation under adversity. Itis the legacy of a noble and enduring spirit, purified by sorrow andsuffering, bequeathing to its successors in calamity the maxims ofsweet morality, and the trains of eloquent but simple reasoning, bywhich it was enabled to bear up against the various ills of life. Itis a talisman, which the unfortunate may treasure up in his bosom, or,like the good King James, lay upon his nightly pillow.

After closing the volume, he turns its contents over in his mind,and gradually falls into a fit of musing on the fickleness of fortune,the vicissitudes of his own life, and the evils that had overtaken himeven in his tender youth. Suddenly he hears the bell ringing tomatins; but its sound, chiming in with his melancholy fancies, seemsto him like a voice exhorting him to write his story. In the spirit ofpoetic errantry he determines to comply with this intimation: hetherefore takes pen in hand, makes with it a sign of the cross toimplore a benediction, and sallies forth into the fairy land ofpoetry. There is something extremely fanciful in all this, and it isinteresting as furnishing a striking and beautiful instance of thesimple manner in which whole trains of poetical thought aresometimes awakened, and literary enterprises suggested to the mind.

In the course of his poem he more than once bewails the peculiarhardness of his fate; thus doomed to lonely and inactive life, andshut up from the freedom and pleasure of the world, in which themeanest animal indulges unrestrained. There is a sweetness, however,in his very complaints; they are the lamentations of an amiable andsocial spirit at being denied the indulgence of its kind andgenerous propensities; there is nothing in them harsh nor exaggerated;they flow with a natural and touching pathos, and are perhaps renderedmore touching by their simple brevity. They contrast finely with thoseelaborate and iterated repinings, which we sometimes meet with inpoetry;- the effusions of morbid minds sickening under miseries oftheir own creating, and venting their bitterness upon an unoffendingworld. James speaks of his privations with acute sensibility, buthaving mentioned them passes on, as if his manly mind disdained tobrood over unavoidable calamities. When such a spirit breaks forthinto complaint, however brief, we are aware how great must be thesuffering that extorts the murmur. We sympathize with James, aromantic, active, and accomplished prince, cut off in the lustihood ofyouth from all the enterprise, the noble uses, and vigorous delightsof life; as we do with Milton, alive to all the beauties of nature andglories of art, when he breathes forth brief, but deep-tonedlamentations over his perpetual blindness.

Had not James evinced a deficiency of poetic artifice, we mightalmost have suspected that these lowerings of gloomy reflection weremeant as preparative to the brightest scene of his story; and tocontrast with that refulgence of light and loveliness, thatexhilarating accompaniment of bird and song, and foliage and flower,and all the revel of the year, with which he ushers in the lady of hisheart. It is this scene, in particular, which throws all the magicof romance about the old Castle Keep. He had risen, he says, atdaybreak, according to custom, to escape from the dreary meditationsof a sleepless pillow. "Bewailing in his chamber thus alone,"despairing of all joy and remedy, "for, tired of thought andwobegone," he had wandered to the window, to indulge the captive'smiserable solace of gazing wistfully upon the world from which he isexcluded. The window looked forth upon a small garden which lay at thefoot of the tower. It was a quiet, sheltered spot, adorned with arborsand green alleys, and protected from the passing gaze by trees andhawthorn hedges.

Now was there made, fast by the tower's wall,A garden faire, and in the corners setAn arbour green with wandis long and smallRailed about, and so with leaves beset

Was all the place and hawthorn hedges knet,That lyf* was none, walkyng there forbye

That might within scarce any wight espye.

So thick the branches and the leves grene,Beshaded all the alleys that there were,

And midst of every arbour might be sene

The sharpe, grene, swete juniper,

Growing so fair, with branches here and there,That as it seemed to a lyf without,The boughs did spread the arbour all about.

And on the small grene twistis*(2) set

The lytel swete nightingales, and sung

So loud and clear, the hymnis consecrate

Of lovis use, now soft, now loud among,

That all the garden and the wallis rung

Right of their song-

* Lyf, Person.

*(2) Twistis, small boughs or twigs.

Note.- The language of the quotations is generally modernized.

It was the month of May, when every thing was in bloom; and heinterprets the song of the nightingale into the language of hisenamored feeling:

Worship, all ye that lovers be, this May,For of your bliss the kalends are begun,

And sing with us, away, winter, away,

Come, summer, come, the sweet season and sun.

As he gazes on the scene, and listens to the notes of the birds,he gradually relapses into one of those tender and undefinablereveries, which fill the youthful bosom in this delicious season. Hewonders what this love may be, of which he has so often read, andwhich thus seems breathed forth in the quickening breath of May, andmelting all nature into ecstasy and song. If it really be so great afelicity, and if it be a boon thus generally dispensed to the mostinsignificant beings, why is he alone cut off from its enjoyments?

Oft would I think, O Lord, what may this be,That love is of such noble myght and kynde?

Loving his folke, and such prosperitee

Is it of him, as we in books do find:

May he oure hertes setten* and unbynd:

Hath he upon our hertes such maistrye?

Or is all this but feynit fantasye?

For giff he be of so grete excellence,

That he of every wight hath care and charge,What have I gilt*(2) to him, or done offense,That I am thral'd, and birdis go at large?

* Setten, incline.

*(2) Gilt, what injury have I done, etc.

In the midst of his musing, as he casts his eye downward, he beholds"the fairest and the freshest young floure" that ever he had seen.

It is the lovely Lady Jane, walking in the garden to enjoy thebeauty of that "fresh May morrowe." Breaking thus suddenly upon hissight, in the moment of loneliness and excited susceptibility, sheat once captivates the fancy of the romantic prince, and becomes theobject of his wandering wishes, the sovereign of his ideal world.

There is, in this charming scene, an evident resemblance to theearly part of Chaucer's Knight's Tale; where Palamon and Arcite fallin love with Emilia, whom they see walking in the garden of theirprison. Perhaps the similarity of the actual fact to the incidentwhich he had read in Chaucer may have induced James to dwell on itin his poem. His description of the Lady Jane is given in thepicturesque and minute manner of his master; and being doubtless takenfrom the life, is a perfect portrait of a beauty of that day. Hedwells, with the fondness of a lover, on every article of her apparel,from the net of pearl, splendent with emeralds and sapphires, thatconfined her golden hair, even to the "goodly chaine of smallorfeverye"* about her neck, whereby there hung a ruby in shape of aheart, that seemed, he says, like a spark of fire burning upon herwhite bosom. Her dress of white tissue was looped up to enable herto walk with more freedom. She was accompanied by two femaleattendants, and about her sported a little hound decorated with bells;probably the small Italian hound of exquisite symmetry, which was aparlor favorite and pet among the fashionable dames of ancienttimes. James closes his description by a burst of general eulogium:

* Wrought gold.

In her was youth, beauty, with humble port,Bounty, richesse, and womanly feature;

God better knows then my pen can report,

Wisdom, largesse,* estate,*(2) and cunning*(3) sure,In every point so guided her measure,In word, in deed, in shape, in countenance,That nature might no more her child advance.

* Largesse, bounty.

*(2) Estate, dignity.

*(3) Cunning, discretion.