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[The clematis shows that the summer is nearly over; then follows autumn, and after it comes winter, which always reminds me of deaththe end of everything.] IN purple splendor drooping, The clematis by the gate, Is the symbol of summer departing, To the living spring returneth, But what avails to the dead That the grass should be green above them, Is there aught remaineth of knowledge, In some graveyard is left for a token That we who once were are not, now That ineffable mystic presence We call death stooped and kissed our brow? Love of you now conquers grief, Shines in sunlight after rain, Ah! but shall I keep the boon? Lamps to bid the darkness flee? PERCY PINKERTON. VERITATEM DILEXI. IN MEMORIAM E. R. "TRUTH is an Idol," spake the Christian sage. "Thou shalt not worship Truth, divorced from Love. Truth is but God's mere image. Look above!" So Pascal wrote; and still we muse the page. "Truth is divine," said Plato, "but on high She dwells, and few may be her worship pers, SONG. GOLDEN face that human sorrow May not touch nor make less fair, Lustre from you let me borrow, Sunbeams that shall banish care; All the grief of all my years In your presence disappears. Dear, delightful, dark blue eyes! Life seemed like an autumn day, Hope was as a flame that dies, Till you shone across my way; But when your great glory broke O'er my life, this love awoke ; A CRADLE SONG. THE angels are bending Above your white bed, They weary of tending The souls of the dead. God smiles in high heaven From The New Review. that indefatigable worker prepares dur- THE archæological researches which have made Egypt again famous in recent times are continually finding new starting points, and continually providing the world with surprises. It is but recently that the excavations at Tell-elamarna discovered to us the wonderful fact that diplomatic correspondence between Assyria and Egypt was not only common fourteen centuries before Christ, but that it was carried on in Meanwhile there is one large departcuneiform writing. The great "find "ment of his discovery which he has of the bodies of the kings and queens delegated to others - the task of dein their remote hiding-place in 1881 ciphering and publishing the many recovered for us the body of the most texts on papyrus which he had acfamous of all Egyptian kings, Ramses quired. The Coptic part is just now II.; and in the Cairene Museum the being brought out by Mr. Crum; the returning visitor may see rooms of Egyptian part (hieratic and demotic) treasures which have accumulated dur- has been consigned to Mr. Griffiths, ing each year of the last decade. But of the British Museum; the Greek part, no field of discovery has been more first attacked by Mr. Sayce, who read novel and fruitful than the Fayyûm, an many of the texts, though he published oasis, or depression, apart from the but a few, has come into my hands, and west of the Nile valley, which seems I have given a specimen of what they to have been forgotten till yesterday, are in the 66 Cunningham Memoir" when the opening of a railway line from VIII., published with admirable autoAssiout into this fruitful tract not only type facsimiles by the enterprise of the developed its material resources, but Royal Irish Academy. A second and excited the interest of Egyptian schol- far larger instalment of these papers is at present in process of being printed. From this source have come most of But as this publication is both expenthe texts on papyrus which have en- sive and intended for specialists — those grossed the world of letters for the last of Germany are already writing volumes few years. Some indeed, such as the of controversy about it—it may be defamous Aristotle, have had their hiding-sirable to put in a popular form the place hidden by those who are still searching this mine of literary gold; but the great collection purchased by the Archduke Rainer (of Austria), and many of the still more various and curious discoveries of Mr. Petrie, are from this small corner of Egypt, nor is it at all likely that we have obtained more than a tithe of what still lies beneath the sand. The Archduke Rainer's collection, dating from various centuries, and in many tongues, is being catalogued, and also carefully deciphered and published, by a competent committee of savants in Vienna. The material part of Mr. Petrie's discoveries has been illustrated and explained in the fascinating series of volumes which ars. main results of my labors for the last two years. These labors are by no means completed. It is but six weeks ago that, at the Oriental Congress in London, Mr. Newberry placed in my hands a great new consignment which will require many months of further study, and which I have already ascertained to be scraps of the very same papers, in some cases supplying the gaps in what I have already published. The collection now in my hands is not like that of the archduke, ranging through many languages and over many centuries; it is a collection almost exclusively derived from a very brief epoch-say fifty years - but all of it |