faint responses of the choir. These paused for a time, and all was hushed. Suddenly the notes of the deepabouring organ burst upon the ear, falling with doubled land redoubled intensity, and rolling, as it were, huge billows of sound. How well do their volume and grandeur accord with this mighty building! With what pomp do they swell through its vast vaults, and breathe their awful harmony through these caves of death, and make the silent sepulchre vocal! And now they rise in triumphant acclamation, heaving higher and higher their accordant notes, and piling sound on sound. And now they pause, and the soft voices of the choir break out into sweet gushes of melody; they soar aloft and warble along the roof, and seem to play about these lofty vaults like the pure airs of heaven. Again the pealing organ heaves its thrilling thunders, compressing air into music, and rolling it forth upon the soul. What longdrawn cadences! What solemn sweeping concords! It grows more and more dense and powerful; it fills the vast pile, and seems to jar the very walls; the ear is stunned; the senses are overwhelmed; and now it is winding up in full jubilee; it is rising from earth to heaven; the very soul seems rapt away, and floating upward on this swelling note of harmony!

I sat for some time lost in that kind of reverie which a strain of music is apt sometimes to inspire. The shadows of evening were gradually thickening around me; the monuments began to cast a deeper gloom; and the distant clock gave token of the slowly waning day. I rose and retraced my morning's walk, and as I passed out at the portal of the cloisters, the door, closing with a jarring noise behind me, filled the whole building with echoes. I endeavoured to form some arrangement in

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my mind of the objects I had been contemplating, but found they were already passing into indistinctness and confusion. "What," thought I, "is this vast assemblage of sepulchres but a treasury of humiliation; a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the emptiness of renown and the certainty of oblivion? It is, indeed, the empire of death; his great and shadowy palace; where he sits in state, mocking at the relics of human glory, and spreading dust and forgetfulness on the monuments of princes. How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages. We are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside to be speedily forgotten. The idol of to-day, pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will in turn be supplanted by his successor of to

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morrow.

What, then, is to ensure this pile, which now towers above me, from sharing the fate of mightier mausoleums? The time must come when its gilded vaults, which now spring so loftily, shall lie in rubbish beneath the feet; when, instead of the sound of melody and praise, the wind shall whistle through the broken arches, and the owl hoot from the shattered tower; when the garish sunbeam shall break into these gloomy mansions of death; and the ivy twine around the fallen columns; and the foxglove hang its blossoms about the nameless urn, as if in mockery of the dead. Thus man passes

away; his name perishes from record and from recollection; his history is a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.-Washington Irving.

LESSON LXXXVI.-THE PYRAMIDS.

The approach to the Pyramids is first a rich green plain, and then the Desert; that is, they are just at the beginning of the Desert, on a ridge, which of itself gives them a lift above the Valley of the Nile. It is impossible not to feel a thrill, as one finds oneself drawing nearer to the greatest and the most ancient monuments in the world, to see them coming out stone by stone into view, and the dark head of the Sphinx peering over the lower sandhills. Yet the usual accounts are correct which represent this nearer sight as not impressive-their size diminishes, and the clearness with which you see their several stones strips them of their awful or mysterious character. It is not till you are close under the great Pyramid, and look up at the huge blocks rising above you into the sky, that the consciousness is forced upon you that this is the nearest approach to a mountain that the art of man has produced.

The view from the top has the same vivid contrast of Life and Death, which makes all wide views in Egypt striking-the Desert and the green plain: only the view over the Desert-the African Desert-being much more extensive here than elsewhere, one gathers in better the notion of the wide-heaving ocean of sandy billows which hovers on the edge of the Valley of the Nile. The white line of the minarets of Cairo is also a peculiar featurepeculiar because it is strange to see a modern Egyptian city which is a grace instead of a deformity to the view You also see the strip of Desert which marks Heliopolis and Goshen.

The strangest feature in the view is the platform on

which the Pyramids stand. It completely dispels the involuntary notion that one has formed of the solitary abruptness of the Three Pyramids. Not to speak of the groups, in the distance, of Abou-Sir, Takara, and Dashur-the whole platform of this greatest of them all, is a maze of pyramids and tombs. Three little ones stand beside the first, three also beside the third. The second and third are each surrounded by traces of square enclosures, and their eastern faces are approached through enormous masses of ruins, as if of some great temple; whilst the first is enclosed on three sides by long rows of massive tombs, on which you look down from the top as on the plats of a stone-garden. You see, in short, that it is the most sacred and frequented part of that vast cemetery which extends all along the western ridge for twenty miles behind Memphis.

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It is only by going round the whole place in detail that the contrast between its present and its ancient state is disclosed. One is inclined to imagine that the Pyramids are immutable, and that such as you see them now, such they were always. Of distant views this is true; but taking them near at hand, it is more easy from the existing ruins to conceive Karnac as it was, than it is to conceive the pyramidal platform as it was. smooth casing of part of the top of the second pyramid, and the magnificent granite blocks which form the lower stages of the third, serve to show what they must have been all, from top to bottom; the first and second brilliant white or yellow limestone, smooth from top to bottom, instead of those rude disjointed masses which their stripped sides now present; the third, all glowing with the red granite from the First Cataract. As it is, they have the barbarous look of Stonehenge; but then

they must have shone with the polish of an age already rich with civilization; and that the more remarkab e when it is remembered that these granite blocks, which furnished the outside of the third and inside of the first, must have come all the way from the First Cataract. It also seems, from Herodotus and others, that these smooth outsides were covered with sculptures. Then you must build up or uncover the massive tombs, now broken or choked with sand, so as to restore the aspect of vast streets of tombs, like those on the Appian Way, out of which the Great Pyramid would rise like a cathedral above smaller churches. Lastly, you must enclose the two other pyramids with stone precincts and gigantic gateways, and above all you must restore the Sphinx, as he (for it must never be forgotten that a female Sphinx was almost unknown) was in the days of his glory.

Even now, after all that we have seen of colossal statues, there was something stupendous in the sight of that enormous head-its vast projecting wig, its great ears, its open eyes, the red colour still visible on its cheek, the immense projection of the whole lower part of its face. Yet, what must it have been when on its head there was the royal helmet of Egypt; on its chin the royal beard; when the stone pavement, by which men approached the pyramids, ran up between its paws; when immediately under its breast an altar stood, from which the smoke went up into the gigantic nostrils of that nose, now vanished from the face, never to be conceived again! All this is known with certainty from the remains which actually exist deep under the sand on which you stand, as you look up from a distance into the broken but still expressive features.