bers solemnize the court. If the head and unutterable neck of Isis are revealed, wonder for the rest is more worshipful than sight.

Besides, excavation implies cicerones and swarms of romantic travellers in the way of each other's romance. You will remember, Xtopher, how fatal to sentiment was a simple English "good evening,” in the moonlighted Roman forum. Imagination craved only salutations after the high Roman fashion, and when Lydia Languish did not find the Coliseum so "funny" as Naples, you regretted the facilities of steam, and yearned to pace that pavement alone with the ghosts of Cæsar and Marc Antony. Haste to Egypt, Xtopher, and that Roman wish shall be fulfilled; for you shall walk erect and alone with Persian Cambyses, or mild-eyed Herodotus, or inscrutable Ramses-for "there is every man his own fool, and the world's sign is taken down."

Excavation implies arrangement, and the sense of time's work upon a temple or a statue, or even a human face, is lost or sadly blunted, when all the chips are swept away, and his dusty, rubbishy work-shop is smoothed into a saloon of sentiment. Who ever entered, for the first time, the Coliseum, without a fall to zero in the mercury of enthusiasm, at the sight of the well-sanded area, the cross, shrines, and sentinels? When it is not enough that science and

romance carry away specimens of famous places to their museums, but Mammon undertakes the making of the famous place itself into a choice cabinet, they may be esteemed happy who flourished prior to that period.

And it is pleasant to see remains so surpassingly remarkable, without having them shown by a seedycoated, bad-hatted, fellow-creature, at five francs a day. You climb alone to Aboo Simbel in that serene southern silence, and half fear to enter the awful presence of the Osiride columns, or to penetrate into the adyta, mysterious to you as to those of old, and you donkey quietly, with a taciturn old time, over the plain of green young grain, where Thebes was, and feel as freshly as the first who saw it.

But these things will come. Egypt must soon be the favorite ground of the modern Nimrod, travel-who so tirelessly hunts antiquity. After Egypt, other lands and ruins are young, and scant, and tame, save the Parthenon and Pestum. Every thing invites the world hither.

It will come, and Thebes will be cleaned up and fenced in. Steamers will leave for the cataract, where donkeys will be in readiness to convey parties to Philæ, at seven A. M. precisely, touching at Esne and Edfoo. Upon the Libyan suburb will

arise the Hôtel royal au Ramses le grand for the selectest fashion. There will be the Hôtel de Memnon for the romantic, the Hôtel aux Tombeaux for the reverend clergy, and the Pension Re-ni-no-fre upon the water-side for the invalides and sentimentalonly these names will then be English; for France is a star eclipsed in the East.

But, before the world arrives, live awhile in the loneliness of the Theban temples and tombs, with no other society than Memnon, and the taciturn old time, and the chibouque. You will seem then, not to have travelled in vain, but to have arrived somewhere. Here you will realize what you have read and thought you believed, that the past was alive. The great vague phantom, that goes ever before us, will pause here, and turning, look at you with human features, and speak a language sweet, and solemn, and strange, though unintelligible.

You, too, will linger and linger, though the sunset warn you away. You, too, will tarry for the priests in the court of Meedenet Haboo, and listen for the voice of Memnon. You, too, will be glad that the temples are as time left them, and that man has only wondered, not worked, at them. You, too, will leave lingeringly the Libyan suburb, and own to Osiris in your heart, that if the young gods are glorious, the old gods were great.

XLIII.

KARNAK.

All

KARNAK antedates coherent history, yet it was older the day we saw it than ever before. thought and poetry, inspired by its antiquity, had richer reason that day than when they were recorded, and so you, meditative reader, will have the advantage of this chapter, when you stand in Karnak. Older than history, yet fresh, as if just ruined for the romantic.

The stones of the fallen walls are as sharplyedged as the hammer left them. They lie in huge heaps, or separately standing in the sand; and, regarding the freshness, you would say that Cambyses and his Persians had marched upon Memphis only last week, while the adherents of the earthquake theory of Egyptian ruin, might fancy they yet felt the dying throes of the convulsion that had shattered these walls.

This freshness is startling. It is sublime. Embalming these temples in her amber air, has not nature so hinted the preservation of their builders'

bodies? Was the world so enamored of its eldest born, that it could not suffer even the forms of his races and their works to decay? And, O mild-eyed Isis! how beautiful are the balances of nature! In climates where damp and frost crack and corrode, she cherishes with fair adorning the briefer decay. Italy had greenly graced Karnak with foliage. Vines had there clustered and clambered caressingly around these columns, in graceful tendrils wreathing away into the blue air its massive grace. Flowery grass had carpeted the courts, and close-clinging moss shed a bloom along the walls to the distant eye of hope or memory.

Haply it had been dearer so to the painter and the poet. But this death that does not decay, is awful. On the edge of the desert, fronting the level green that spreads velvet before it to the river, Karnak scorns time, earthquakes, Cambyses, and Lathyrus, yes, and scorns, also, romantic disappointment. For it is not the most interesting or pleasing of Egyptian remains. It is austere and terrible, and sure to disappoint the romance that seeks in ruins, bowers of sentiment. Let the Misses Verde remember that, when they consider the propriety of visiting Karnak. Peradventure, also, they will there discover hieroglyphs more inexplicable than those of Theban tombs.