'Scarce with more certain order waves the sun
His matin banners in the eastern sky,
Than at the reckoned period are begun
The operations of fertility;

Through the long swamp, thy bosom swelling high
Expands between the sandy mountain chains,
The walls of Libya and of Araby,

Till, in the active virtue it contains,

The desert bases sink, and rise prolific plains.

'See through the naked length no blade of grass,
No animate sign, relieves the dismal strand,
Such it might seem our orb's first substance was,
Ere touched by God with generative hand;
Yet at one step we reach the teeming land
Lying fresh-green beneath the scorching sun,
As succulent, as if at his command

It held all rains that fall, all brooks that run,

And this, O generous Nile! is thy vast benison.'

Seeing that the Egyptians owed so much to this stream, and that their prosperity and very existence depended on it, the poet thinks it no wonder

'That gratitude of old to worship grew,
That as a living god thou wert addrest,
And to itself the immediate agent drew

To one creative power the feelings only due.'

To this he adds in a note: 'In the oldest form of Egyptian theology of which we have cognizance, the Nile is a god. . . . The Egyptian theologians also imagined divisions in heaven similar to those of the earth, and could conceive no paradise without a celestial Nile.' To the lines

'For in thy title, and in nature's truth,
Thou art, and makest, Egypt,'

a note is also appended, in which the writer truly remarks that "the "Egypt" of Homer is the river, not the country; all the other Greek names of Egypt are derived from the Nile. Its Coptic name was Phairo-hence probably Pharaoh. In somewhat of the same sense is India derived from the Indus.'

It is far from unlikely that the king supposed himself in his dream visiting the Nile, in discharge of some of the duties connected with the idolatrous worship rendered to that stream. There were many such. The most important was the Niloa, an annual festival for invoking the blessings of the inundation. This was one of the principal of the Egyptian festivals. It took place about the summer solstice, when the river began to rise; and the anxiety with which the people looked forward to a plentiful inundation induced them to celebrate it with more than usual honour. It is stated that the rites of this solemnity were deemed of so much importance by the Egyptians, that unless they were performed at the proper season, and in a becoming manner, by the persons appointed to the duty, they felt persuaded that the Nile would refuse to rise and inundate the land. Their full belief in the efficacy of the ceremony secured its annual performance on a grand scale. Men and women assembled from all parts of the country in the towns of their respective nomes, or shires; grand festivities were proclaimed, and all the enjoyments of the table were united with the solemnity of a holy festival. Music, dances, and appropriate hymns, marked the respect which they felt for the deity; and a wooden statue of the tutelary deity of the river was carried by the priests through the villages, in solemn procession, that all might appear to be honoured by his presence and aid, while invoking the blessings he was about to confer. If the dreams of Pharaoh followed the day of such a solemnity as this-as seems to us highly probable-they could not fail to be regarded as peculiarly significant and important.

The modern inhabitants of Egypt, being for the most part Mohammedans, do not now worship the Nile after this fashion; but, after their own manner, they do still look upon it with great veneration; and whatever be the place of their sojourning, the natives of the Nile still speak of its waters with the most enthusiastic regard. The poet we have lately cited finely touches on this:

1 See WILKINSON's Ancient Egyptians, ii. 293.

'And now, in Egypt's late degraded day,
A venerating love attends thee still;
And the poor Fellah,1 from thee torn away,
Feels a strange yearning his rude bosom fill.
Like the remembered show of lake and hill,
That wrings the Switzer's soul, though fortune smile,
Thy image haunts him, uncontrolled by will,
And wealth or war in vain the heart beguile,

That clings to its mud hut and palms beside the Nile.'

In fact, a peculiarly luscious, refreshing, and nutritive quality is ascribed by the natives to the waters of the Nile; and it is almost affecting to hear the expressions of intense longing with which a native who has been any time away from Egypt speaks of the Nile water. One would think that it was at once meat, and drink, and medicine to them.

In one of the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, some merchants of Mosul, who had seen much of the eastern world in their time, are represented as speaking of the wonders they had seen in their various travels. 'Say what you will,' said one, 'the man who has not seen Egypt has not seen the greatest rarity of the world. . . . If you speak of the Nile, where is there a more wonderful river? What water was ever lighter or more delicious? The very slime it carries along in its overflowing fattens the fields, which produce a thousand times more than other countries that are cultivated with the greatest labour. Observe what a poet said of the Nile, when he was obliged to depart from Egypt: "Your Nile loads you with blessings every day. It is for you only that it comes from distant lands. Alas! in departing from you, my tears will flow as abundantly as its waters. You are to continue in the enjoyment of its sweetnesses, while I am constrained to forego them against my will.""

It is a singular fact that the word Nile, now in such common use, never occurs either in the Hebrew or English Bible. Though it is probably of eastern origin, it cannot be traced beyond the 1 Peasant.

2 The tale of the Jewish Physician. Lane's translation has merely the skeleton of the passage, which is preserved more fully in the old translation.

early Greek writers. It is supposed to be allied to the Sanscrit word Nilah, 'black,' and to be descriptive of the dark colour of the water. The Egyptian name of the river in the time of Moses appears to have been Yeor, which he generally uses in the Pentateuch. It signifies, in the old Egyptian language, ‘river.' The Nile being the great and the only river of Egypt, Yeor came to be used as a proper name for the Nile, and is so employed by all the sacred writers except Daniel. Unfortunately it has been rendered as an appellative by the translators of our Bible, so that we read Pharaoh 'stood by the river, when it ought to be 'by the Yeor? The passage in Ex. i. 22 should be read, 'Every son that is born ye shall cast into the Yeor?

1

In that remarkable passage in which the boundaries of the land given in covenant promise to Abraham are described, the Nile is termed 'the river of Egypt:' 'Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.' The phrase 'river of Egypt,' however, is not exclusively employed in the English Bible in reference to the Nile. Where it is the translation of the Hebrew Nakhal Mitzraim, it means Wady el-Arish, a valley and winter stream on the northern border of Egypt.2 The Nile is also called Shihor (or Sihor) by the sacred writers. Thus it is said, 'So David gathered all Israel together from Shihor of Egypt even unto the entering of Hemath ;'3 and Jeremiah exclaims, 'What hast thou to do in the way of Egypt, to drink the waters of Sihor 2'4 Isaiah also, in describing the glory of Tyre, says, 'And by great waters the sowing of Sihor, the harvest of Yeor, is her revenue.' Tyre, with the whole of Phoenicia, drew its supplies of corn mainly from Egypt. Shihor is a descriptive name, signifying 'the black,' and is thus equivalent to Nile.

The Nile is the longest river in the world; but its vast importance cannot even be estimated by its magnitude. Without the Nile Egypt would be a desert; by it the country is made one of the most productive on earth. The periodical inundations of the Nile have attracted the attention of men in all ages. Year after year, at the summer solstice, it begins to rise, and goes on steadily increasing, until at the vernal equinox it has attained an elevation, at Cairo, of some twenty-six feet above its lowest level. Its waters now inundate the whole of the low plains along its banks, irrigating

1 Gen. xv. 18.

2 As in Num. xxxiv. 5; Josh. xv. 4, 47; 1 Kings viii. 65, etc.

31 Chron. xiii. 5.

4 Jer. ii. 18.

5 Isa. xxiii. 3.

occur.

the soil, leaving a rich deposit of alluvium, and thus making the country most productive. As there is no rain in Egypt, should the Nile not attain a sufficient height to overflow its banks-should it rise only twenty instead of twenty-six feet, a failure of the whole crop of Egypt would be the result. Such failures do occasionally The long-continued drought which withers up the herbage of neighbouring countries, prevents the rain from falling on the mountains of Central Africa, and consequently the sources of the Nile are greatly diminished, and the river does not attain a sufficient height to irrigate the parched soil. Arab historians mention two such catastrophes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The first lasted for seven years; and the record given by Abd el-Latif1 of its fearful effects enables us to understand the cry of the people to Joseph: 'Give us bread, for why should we die in thy presence? Buy us and our land for bread.' And also their thankfulness at a later period: 'Thou hast saved our lives; let us find grace in the sight of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh's slaves.' It is also a well-known fact, that when the Nile rises a few feet above its usual elevation, a season of extraordinary fruitfulness follows. Thus the 'seven years of plenty' were no doubt occasioned.

Twelfth Week-Sixth Day.

THE ROYAL DREAMS.-GENESIS XLI. 1-36.

YESTERDAY we pointed out the considerations suggested by the presence of the Nile in the king of Egypt's dreams. There are some other matters in these remarkable visions which will this day demand our attention. If the incidents of the dreams were, as we have supposed, substantially such as might be witnessed in actual life, although not in exactly the same combinations, it may seem a strange circumstance that cattle should appear to come up out of the river. That they should appear to do so, was needful to give the symbols their proper connection and significance. But for that purpose it would have been sufficient that the animals should come up out of the river's bed; and cattle which had been down to the water to drink, 1 Relation de l'Egypte, ii.