 | The Poetical Works of the Rev. George Croly |  |
SANDT, THE MURDERER.
Sandt was a student in a German University, who, inflamed by the mysticism and extravagance of the half-revolutionary and half-infidel doctrines, which perverted the German youth at the close of the French war, determined to make himself memorable by sacrificing some enemy of his country. For this enemy he fixed on Kotzebue, the dramatist, who, from his being known to send letters on the state of the German public mind to the Emperor Alexander, had rendered himself suspected by the partizans of the Tugendbund. Sandt went to his house, handed him a letter, and while he was looking over it, stabbed him to the heart. He then gave himself some desperate wounds, but was seized before he could thus atrociously consummate the double triumph of the new philosophy. After a long imprisonment, he was brought to trial, sentenced, and put to death on the glacis of Manheim.
Of hammers through the darkness rang,
And on the rampart's vapoury swamp
High swung one faint and fitful lamp,
And came upon the gusty swell
The challenge of the sentinel;
As if some deed were doing there
Unfit for man to see or hear.
By Manheim's gates were signs of woe—
A scaffold hung with black, a chair,
A sable bench,—a sabre bare,
Show'd, that before the setting sun
Some wretch's chain should be undone.
Come chargers' tramp, and trumpet's call:
And, in the horsemen's midst, the dawn
Gleams on a face lone, wild, and wan;
The dazzled eye, the lip of blue,
Tell that to them the light is new;
Tell of the chain, the heavy air,
That damps the felon's sleepless lair.
The hand;—that pale, thin hand, which now
So feebly wanders o'er the brow,
By that was murder done; the stain
That left the hand, has dyed the brain.
The headsman stands beside the chair;
The pale, uncover'd multitude
Are hush'd as death; now—blood for blood!
Through man beside that fearful goal?
Now, man of sin! thy harvest reap.
He sees a traitor's step intrude
Upon an old man's solitude;
He sees the dagger in his heart,—
The writhe, ere soul and body part,—
The gasp, the dying gush of gore:—
The murderer dares to think no more,
Curses the moment's frantic zeal,
And hurries to the headsman's steel.
His native mountains lovely shone;
He raised one eastward, eager glare,
Wildly inhaled the living air,
On sun and sky his eyeball cast,
Like one who on them look'd his last;
Gave to the world one dreary sigh,
Then summon'd his sad strength to die.
To heaven arose the trumpet-clang,—
And of the murderer, all that lay
Upon that floor was blood and clay.
| The Poetical Works of the Rev. George Croly | |