Whistling to the air, which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra, too,

And made a gap in nature."

"Rare Egyptian."

"There's the junk," said the Pacha.

"She be float very quick," said Golden-Sleeve, and sliding down the sand, we stepped on board and gave chase to fancy's fair flotilla. Fair and fleet, it floated on, away, nor ever comes to shore. But still through the cloudless calm of sky and stream your dreaming sees it pass, with measured throb of languid oars, voluptuous music voicing the day's repose.

In the afternoon, we dropped leisurely down the river to Thebes. Before sunset we were moored to the shore of Luxor, on the eastern side of the stream, and almost in the shadow of the temple. A cluster of Howadji's boats clung to the shore with gay streamers and national flags, and all over the shore sat and stood groups of natives with trinkets and curiosities to sell, or donkeys to let. We strolled up to the temple of Luxor, and looked westward over the mountains of the "Libyan suburb," as Herodotus calls the part of the city upon the western shore. It was covered with temples and tombs then, but the great mass of the city was on the eastern bank, where Luxor now stands. The highlands

were exquisitely hued in the sunset. But Patience was so belabored with an universal shriek of bucksheesh, that she fled to the junk again, and recovered in the cool calm of Theban starlight.

XXXVI.

ΜΕΜΝΟΝ.

"Heard melodies are sweet,-but those unheard are sweeter."

FROM earliest childhood Memnon was the central, commanding figure in my fancies of the East. Rising imagination struck first upon his form, and he answered in music-wondrous, wooing, winning, that must needs vibrate forever, although his voice is hushed. Whether this was from an instinctive feeling, that this statue and its story were a kind of completeness and perfection in art-the welcome recognition of art by nature-or more probably from the simple marvellousness and beauty of the tale, I shall inquire of the Sphinx. As we passed up the river, and I beheld in the solemn, sunless morning light, like a shadowed, thoughtful summer day, the majestic form sitting serenely upon the plain, the most prominent and noticeable object in the landscape, I knew that memories would linger around him as hopes had clustered, and that his calm grandeur would rule my East forever.

For throned upon ruined Thebes sits Memnon, himself a ruin, but regal still. Once seen he is always seen, and sits as uncrumbling in memory as in the wide azure silence of his Libyan plain. Daily comes the sun as of old, and inspires him no longer. Son of the morning! why so silent? Yet not dumb utterly, sing still the Persians, when poets listen, kindred sons of the morning.

Yearly comes the Nile humbly to his feet, and laving them, pays homage. Then receding slowly, leaves water plants wreathed around the throne, on which he is sculptured as a good genius harvesting the lotus, and brings a hundred travellers to perpetuate the homage.

The history of art says little of Memnon and his mate, and the more perfect Colossi of Aboo Simbel. Yet it is in these forms that the Howadji most strongly feels the maturity of the Egyptian mind— more strongly than in the temples whose sculptures are childish. But here you feel that the artist recognized, as we do to-day, that serene repose is the attitude and character of godlike grandeur.

Nor are there any works of art so well set in the landscape, save the Pestum temples in their seashored, mountain-walled prairie of flowers. Standing between the columns of Neptune's temple at Pestum, let the lover of beauty look out over the

bloom-brilliant plain to the blue sea, and meditate of Memnon. Then, if there be pictures or poems or melodies in his mind, they will be Minerva-born, and surprise himself. Yet he will have a secreter sympathy with these forms than with any temple, how grand or graceful soever. Yes, and more than with any statue that he recalls. And that sympathy will be greater in the degree that these are grander. Not the elastic grace of the Apollo will seem so cognate to him as the melancholy grandeur of Memnon. For these forms impress man with himself. These are our forms, and how wondrously fashioned! In them, we no longer succumb to the landscape, but sit individual and imperial, under the sky, by the mountains and the river. Man is magnified in Memnon.

These sublime sketches in stone are an artist's work. They are not mere masses of uninformed material. And could we know to-day the name of him who carved them in their places, not the greatest names of art should be haloed with more radiant renown. In those earlier days, art was not content with the grace of nature, but coped with its proportions. Vain attempt, but glorious! It was to show us as we are ideally in nature, not the greatest, but the grandest. And to a certain degree this success is achieved. The imitative Romans essayed