man grandeur. Memnon has still a distinct and mysterious interest; for no myth of the most graceful mythology is so significant as its story.

Science rushes in explanatory, with poetic theories of sounding stones in all countries. Humboldt, for Humboldt, as we saw, is a poet, is only too glad to find upon the banks of the South American Oronoko, granite rocks hailing the morning with organ majesty of music. He ascribes the sound to the effect of difference of temperature between the subterranean and outer air. At Syene, too, unimaginative French naturalists have heard a sonorous creaking in the granite quarries, and Napoleon's commission heard, rising from the granite ruins of Karnak, the same creak, at morning. Yet were it a vibration of expanding and contracting stone masses. why still and forever silent, O mystic Memnon!

Priests clambered over night into its lap, and struck a metallic stone at sunrise-exclaims erudition and Sir Gardner, who climbed into the same lap at noonday, and striking the stone with a little hammer, produced a sound, which the listening peasants described in the same terms that Strabo uses. But were priests that struck thrice for Emperor Hadrian so unsycophantic grown, that even for Severus, the restorer of their statue and of their worship, they would not strike at all?

Back into romance, mystic Memnon! Neither the priests who cajoled with it—nor the Pharaoh who built it-nor the wise who deepen its mystery, can affect the artistic greatness of the work, or the poetic significance of its story.

The priests and Pharaohs died, and their names with them. But Memnon remains, not mute, though silent, and let the heirs of Amunoph III. claim it as his statue, from fame, poetry, and thought if they dare!

Memnon and his mate sat sixty feet into the air, before a temple of the said Amunoph-of which a few inarticulate stones lie among the grain behind. From them to the river, for about a mile's distance, went the Strada Regia-the street royal of Thebes. There was a street! upon which, probably, neither Grace church nor Trinity would have been imposing. Yet we are proud of the Neapolitan Toledoof the Roman Corso-of the Berlin Unter den Linden-of the Parisian Boulevards—of London Regent street, and we babble feebly of Broadway. But oh! if Theban society was proportioned to Thebes, to have been a butterfly of that sunshine, a Theban sauntering of a sultry January morning along the Strada Regia, and to have paused in the shadow of Memnon and have taken a hand-any hand, for the mummy merchant here will select you

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, god. like, 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