an interment of two thousand five hundred years, exhibiting to our view specimens of gigantic sculpture, chiseled with all the refinement of Grecian art, cannot fail to excite our admiration with feelings of surprise and wonderment.

The surprise is to learn, that long before the time when civilization first dawned upon Europe, while the forests of Greece served only as a refuge to a few expatriated wanderers, whose crimes or misfortunes had driven them to seek in their fastnesses that asylum which their own native land refused them, and centuries before the foundation of the all imperial Rome, a great and powerful nation, in the valley of the Euphrates, had risen from infancy to maturity, and from maturity was again passing to that inevitable doom of decay which awaits the mightiest empire, as certainly as it does the meanest of mortal things.

The wonderful thing is, that until a very recent date the history of the Assyrian empire should have been so lost as to be treated as a myth, known only to us from certain traditions collected by the Greeks, and by the references to its people, its monarchs, its pride, and its destruction, in the holy prophetical books; and now, through the vast assistance derived from the discoveries made at Nineveh, we have the history of thirty centuries laid bare to our eyes. The revelations of Nineveh will, we hope ere long, induce a similar examination of the ruins of Babylon.

Phidias's Statue of Jupiter Olympius.

O! where, Dodona, is thine aged grove,
Prophetic fount, and oracle divine?

What valley echoed the response of Jove?
What trace remaineth of the thunderer's shrine?

All, all forgotten-and shall man repine

That his frail bonds to fleeting life are broke?

Cease, cease! the fate of gods may well be thine :
Wouldst thou survive the marble or the oak?

When nations, tongues, and worlds must sink beneath
the stroke!

TEMPLE TO JUPITER AT AGRIGENTUM AND AT SELIN.

TEMPLE TO JUPITER AT ROME.

JUPITER ZEUS.

JUPITER AMMON.

TEMPLE OF KARNAK.

TEMPLE OF JUPITER AMMON.

THE STATUE OF JUPITER OLYMPIUS.

Thou art not silent! oracles are thine
Which the wind utters, and the spirit hears,
Lingering, 'mid ruin'd fane and broken shrine,
O'er many a tale and trace of other years!
Bright as an ark, o'er all the flood of tears
That warps thy cradle land-thine earthly love-
Where hours of hope, 'mid centuries of fears,
Have gleam'd, lightnings through the gloom above,-
Stands, roofless to the sky, thy house, Olympiad Jove!

Thy column'd aisles with whispers of the past
Are vocal!-and along thine ivied walls,
While Elian echoes murmur in the blast,
And wild flowers hang, like victor-coronals,
In vain the turban'd tyrant rears his halls,

And plants the symbol of his faith and slaughters,—
Now, even now, the beam of promise falls
Bright upon Hellas, as her own bright daughters,
And a Greek Ararat is rising o'er the waters!

Thou art not silent!-when the southern fair,
Ionia's moon, looks down upon thy breast,
Smiling, as pity smiles above despair,
Soft as young beauty soothing age to rest,
Sings the night-spirit in thy weedy crest;
And she, the minstrel of the moonlight hours,
Breathes, like some lone one sighing to be blest,
Her lay-half hope, half sorrow-from the flowers,
And hoots the prophet-owl, amid his tangled bowers!

And round thine altar's moldering stones are born
Mysterious harpings, wild as ever crept
From him who waked Aurora every morn,
And sad as those he sung her till she slept!
A thousand, and a thousand years have swept

O'er thee, who wert a moral from thy spring-
A wreck in youth! nor vainly hast thou kept
Thy lyre! Olympia's soul is on the wing,
And a few Iphitus has waked beneath its string!

THIS statue was the most renowned work of Phidias, the illustrious artist of Greece, the greatest sculptor of antiquity. Phidias was a native of Athens, and although the exact date of his birth is not known, as far as can be judged from the ascertained dates of his works, it must have been about B. C. 480.

The times in which Phidias lived were peculiarly favorable to the development of his genius and talents, and his ability must have been shown at a very early age, as he was extensively employed upon public works during the administration of Cimon. When Pericles attained the supreme power in Athens, Phidias was consulted on all occasions in which the embellishment of the city, either by magnificent buildings or by sculptured decorations, was contemplated: it was Phidias who had the direction, although other architects and artificers were employed to erect them.

It was at this time the genius of Phidias conceived the daring idea of constructing statues of the gods of Greece, which should unite the opposite qualities of colossal dimensions with materials of comparative minuteness of parts. In Greece, sculpture had been gradually developing itself, through several ages, from the primitive use of the commonest woods to the employment of those of rarer growth, such as ebony or cedar,-in clay, in marble, in metals,-till it at length reached, according to the taste of the age, the highest point of perfection, in the combination, upon a great scale, of ivory and gold. There