SOJOURN IN EGYPT.

O Egypt! how shall we approach thy face?

How steal from thy dumb lips one scrap of song?

Thou stand'st alone, and sendest from thy place

One word, that human lips have shaped for thee,

To seal thy mighty arch with “mystery.”

Time calls his children‘ round him, and they each

Give answer to their names; gray Troy and Greece

Pour out the lesson their dumb lips would teach,

Carthage, Phoenicia, Parthia and Rome

Clothe death with all the eloquence of speech;

And each form linklets of an unbroke chain.

But they are youthful; in perspective dim

As if unmoved with either joy or pain.

With arms enfolded, and with eye all fixed,

A silent portal in the track of time.

In the rough surge of nations still unmixed,

Where the great fathers left thee in the Sphinx,

And heaped the sands upon thy broken links,

Thou dost look down the ages to defy

Tradition, inspiration, and all future progeny.

She sleeps as they advance; their lowing kine

And noisy herds before them, and with the flute

And siren song, they win, as with old wine,

Their way into the slumbering and the mute

Endormir of old Nile; but Egypt wakes,

And breast to breast, opposes their advance.

In vain against the shepherd crew, she breaks

Her ill-spent arrows, shattered every lance,

And Mizraim's sons the rod of empire yield

To sons of Lud; they spread their many tents

On Nile's unequaled garniture of field,

The one discordant note in her great eloquence.

How Nature heals what man has thus laid waste,

The stoic songsters of the worlds orchaste

Sing the same song, for friend and foe alike,

They lift no arm upon a world defaced

With war's stern tread, but with one voice they strike

The note of conquest or the requiem

Of some o'ertoppled Realm, Nature moves on

To shame the bugle blare, or sound of drum,

And sets her thousand nestlings in the dust of the

Unnumbered nations that are gone.

One after one, in stately march of time,

Kings pass, like common people, to the dust;

Unless by over-reaching, and the crime

Of too much selfhood, they are rudely thrust

A little sooner to their Maker's hands,

And their succession made accelerate

By that potention, which each scepter mans,

To fix each calendar, with human date.

No mortal is a law unto himself,

And much less, he who holds the reins of power;

For wisdom seldom is concentrated so,

That one weak soul is master of the hour,

Unquestioned arbiter of human fate,

Free to subdue, to persecute, to kill

The soul that reaches this enlarged estate,

Meets with a giant in the human will,

That soon or late, will crush him with its skill.