"Full fathom deep thy father lies;
Of his bones are corals made;
Those are pearls which were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange;
Fairies hourly ring his knell,
Hark! I hear them. Ding ding dong bell."

The Tempest.

YES, it is over; and the great Armada is vanquished. It is
lulled for awhile, the everlasting war which is in heaven, the
battle of Iran and Turan, of the children of light and of dark-
ness, of Michael and his angels against Satan and his fiends;
the battle which slowly and seldom, once in the course of many
centuries, culminates and ripens into a day of judgment, and
becomes palpable and incarnate; no longer a mere spiritual
fight, but one of flesh and blood, wherein simple men may
choose their sides without mistake, and help God's cause not
merely with prayer and pen, but with sharp shot and cold steel.
A day of judgment has come, which has divided the light from
the darkness, and the sheep from the goats, and tried each
man's work by the fire; and, behold, the devil's work, like its
maker, is proved to have been, as always, a lie and a sham, and
a windy boast, a bladder which collapses at the merest pin-
prick. Byzantine empires, Spanish Armadas, triple-crowned
Papacies, Russian Despotisms, this is the way of them, and
will be to the end of the world. One brave blow at the big
bullying phantom, and it vanishes in sulphur-stench; while the
children of Israel, as of old, see the Egyptians dead on the sea-
shore,--they scarce know how, save that God has done it,--
and sing the song of Moses and of the Lamb.

And now, from England and the Netherlands, from Germany
and Geneva, and those poor Vaudois shepherd-saints, whose
bones for generations past

"Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;"

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