learn the details, and the long list of Ptolemies, and Euergetes, who built, and added, and amended. Thence, too, you will learn the translations of hieroglyphics—the theories, and speculations, and other dusty stuff inseparable from ruins.

You will be grave at Philæ, how serenly sunny soever the day; but with a gravity graver than that of sentiment; for it is the deadness of the death of the land that you will feel. The ruins will be, to you, the remains of the golden age of Egypt; for hither came Thales, Solon, Pythagoras, Herodotus, and Plato, and, from the teachers of Moses, learned the most mystic secrets of human thought. It is the faith of Phile that, developed in a thousand ways, claims our mental allegiance to-day-a faith transcending its teachers, as the sun the eyes which it enlightens. These wise men came--the wise men of Greece, whose wisdom was Egyptian; and hither comes the mere American Howadji, and learns, but with a difference. He feels the greatness of a race departed. He recognizes that a man only differently featured from himself, lived and died here two thousand years ago.

Ptolemy and his Cleopatra walked these terraces; sought shelter from this same sun, in the shade of these same columns; dreamed over the calm river, at sunset, by moonlight; drained their diamond

rimmed goblet of life and love; then, embalmed in sweet spices, were laid dreamless in beautiful tombs. Remembering these things, glide gently from Philæ, for we shall see it no more. Slowly, slowly southward loiters the Ibis, and leaves its columned shores behind. Glide gently from Philæ; but it will not glide from you. Like a queen crowned in death, among her dead people, it will smile sadly through your memory forever.

XXIX.

A CROW THAT FLIES IN HEAVEN'S

and went.

SWEETEST AIR.

FLEETLY the Ibis flew. The divine days came Unheeded the longing sunrise, the lingering eve. Unheeded the lonely shore of Nubia, that swept, sakia-singing, seaward. Unheeded the new world of African solitude, the great realm of Ethiopia. Unheeded the tropic upon which, for the first time, we really entered; and the pylons, columns, and memorial walls, that stood solitary in the sand. The Howadji lay ill in the blue cabin, and there is no beauty, no antiquity, no new world, to an eye diseased.

Yet illness, said a white-haired form that sat shadowy by his side, hath this in it, that it smooths the slope to death. The world is the organization of vital force; but when a man sickens, the substantial reality reels upon his brain. The cords are cut that held him to the ship that sails so proudly the seas, and he drifts lonely in the jolly-boat of his

own severed existence, toward shores unknown. Drifts, not unwillingly, as he sweeps farther away, and his eyes are darkened.

After acute agony, said still the white-haired. shadow, pausing slowly, as if he, too, were once alive and young; death is like sleep after toil. After long decay, it is as natural as sunset. Yet to sit rose-garlanded at the feast of love and beauty, yourself the lover, and the most beautiful, and hearing that you shall depart thence in a hearse, not in a bridal chariot, to rise smilingly and go gracefully away, is a rare remembrance for any man-an heroic death that does not often occur nor is it to be rashly wished. For the heroic death, is the gods' gift to their favorites. Who shall be presumptuous enough to claim that favor. Nay, if all men were heroes, how hard it would be to die and leave them; for our humanity loves heroes more than angels and saints. It would be the discovery of a boundless California, and gold would be precious no

more.

The shadow was silent, and the Nubian moonlight crept yellow along the wall; then, playing upon the Howadji's heart-strings vaguely and at random, as a dreaming artist touching the keys of an instrument, he proceeded. Yet we may all know how many more the dead are than the living, nor be

afraid to join them. Here, in Egypt, it is tombs which are inhabited, it is the cities which are deserted. The great Ramses has died, and all his kingdom-why not little you and I? Nor care to lie in a tomb so splendid. Ours shall be a skyvaulted mausoleum, sculptured with the figures of all life. No man of mature years but has more friends dead than living. His friendly reunion is a shadowy society. Who people for him the tranquil twilight and the summer dawn? In the woods we knew, what forms and faces do we see? What is the meaning of music, and who are its persons? What are the voices of midnight, and what words slide into our minds, like sudden moonlight into dark chambers, and apprise us that we move in the vast society of all worlds and all times, and that if the van is lost to our eyes in the dazzling dawn, and the rear disappears in the shadow of night our mother, and our comrades fall away from our sides —the van, and the rear, and the comrades are yet, and all, moving forward like the water-drops of the Amazon to the sea. It is not strange that when severe sickness comes, we are ready to die. Long buffeted by bleak, blue icebergs, we see at last with equanimity that we are sailing into Symmes's hole.

The Nubian moonlight crept yellow along the