a score from under his robe, shrivelled, black, tough, smoked-beef sort of hands-and not her lover could distinguish the olive tapers of Thothmes III.'s darling, the princess Re-ni-no-fre, from the fingers of the meanest maid that did not dare look at her.

Here we stand in the shadow of Memnon on a sultry January morning, but the princess who should meet us here, lies dreamless and forever in those yellow hills. Sad moralists, these mummy merchants, yet they say not a word!

An earthquake and Cambyses divide the shame of the partial destruction of Memnon; but it cannot be destroyed. This air will cheat time of a prey so precious. Yearly the rising Nile heaps its grave around it. Gradually the earth will resume, into its bosom, this mass which she bore--and there will hold it more undecaying than the mountains, the embalmed bodies of its contemporaries. Unworn in an antiquity in which our oldest fancies are young, it will endure to an unimagined future, then, godlike, vanish unchanged.

Pause, poet, shoreward wending. Upon the level length of green young grain, smooth as the sea-calm, sits Memnon by his mate. If he greet the sun no longer in rising, feel in this serene sunset the song of his magnificent repose. The austere Arabian highlands are tender now.

The lonely Libyan

heights are sand no more, but sapphire. In ever delicater depths of blue and gold dissolve the landscape and the sky. It is the transfiguration of nature, which each of these sunsets is-sweet, and solemn, and sad.

Pause, poet, and confess, that if day dies here so divinely, the sublimest human thought could not more fitly sing its nativity than with the voice of Memnon.

XXXVII.

DEAD KINGS.

A DAZZLING desert defile leads to the kings' tombs at Thebes. The unsparing sun burned our little cavalcade as it wound along. The white, glaring waste was windless; for, although its hill-walls are not lofty, the way is narrow, and stony, and devious. So dreary a way must have made death drearier to those death-doomed royalties. But we donkeyed pleasantly along, like young immortals with all eternity before; and to us, death, and tombs, and kings, were myths only.

And what more are they, those old Egyptian monarchs, for whom these tombs were built? Catch, if you can, these pallid phantoms that hover on the edge of history. King Apappus is more a brain-vapor than Hercules, and our fair, far princess Re-ni-no-fre than our ever sea-fresh Venus. We must believe in Apollo and the Muses; but Amun-m-gori III. is admitted into history solely by our grace. So much a

living myth surpasses a dead man! Give me the Parthenon, and you shall have all the tombs of all the Theban kings.

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They were separated from the rest of the world in the tomb as in the palace. So regal was their royalty that no inferior was company select enough for their corpses. Unhappy hermits, they had to die for society, and then, unhappier, found only themselves. Fancy the mummied monarchs awaking immortal and, looking round, to find themselves and ancestors only! Nothing but old Charlotte," said the third saint George of England. And the sameness of the old story must have infused most plebeian thoughts and desires of society, more spirited though less select, into the mighty monarchs' minds. For, imagine the four English Georges buried together, and together awaking-would any celestial imagination fancy that the choicest coterie of heaven?

We young immortals, donkeying of a bright, blue morning, under blue cotton umbrellas, and cheerfully chatting, can thus moralize upon monarchs at leisure, and snap our fingers at scurvy sceptres, and crowns that make heads lie uneasy, and dribble Hamlet in the churchyard, until we are surfeited with self-complacent sentimentality. But contemporary men, now adjacent mummies, looked on, I

suppose with more dazzled eyes when a dead king, passing, made this defile alive.

Possibly men were blinded by the blaze of royalty in those days, as, spite of the complacent American Howadji, they are in some others. And a thoughtful Theban watching the progress of a royal funeral, over the Nile in barges, up the Strada Regia, wherein the mighty Memnon shielded the eyes of many from the setting sun, then winding with melancholy monotony of music, and gusty wail, and all human pomp, through the solitary, sandy, stony, treeless defile, possibly improvised sonnets on the glory of greatness and mused upon the fate that so gilded a mortal life and death.

Seventy-two days the king lay dead in his palace. Then his body, filled with myrrh and cassia, and cinnamon, and all sweet spices but frankincense, was swathed in gummed cloth, the cunning of life to cheat corruption, and was borne to the tomb which all his life he had been preparing and adorning. Yet life was not long enough to make the bed for his dreamless slumber, and usually the kings died before their tombs were ready.

Such is royal death, mused that Theban, a passage to the delights of heaven from the delights of earth the exchange of the silver for the golden goblet. It is symbolized by this defile, dazzling if