2. They saw the failing life-blood quiver,

As soul and flesh neared Death's dark river,
And at its billows parted;

Then bore to Heaven with holy voicings
The ransomed spirit amid rejoicings, —
The youthful, noble-hearted.

3. They left within the house of mourning
The casket, robbed of its adorning,—
The soul that never slumbers:
All beauteous was it yet in seeming,
As one who sleeps in quiet dreaming,
Or lists to pleasant numbers.

4. And it was strange to see him lying
Arrayed in vestments of the dying;
Oh, it was sad and dreary!

For he was young, and bright, and blooming,
With ardent hopes before him looming,
And heart that ne'er was weary.

5. The good and right with boldness doing,
The better path in all pursuing,
And faithful in each duty,,

His life was one harmonious blending,
To all a gracious influence lending,
So full of truth and beauty.

6. But all is o'er: each young ambition
Burned brightly till his youthful mission
Drew near its final closing;

Then, unto God his spirit giving,
He ceased to labor with the living,

And slept in sweet reposing.

7. And though the grave his form is keeping,
He is not dead, he is but sleeping,

To wake to joys supernal :

One seraph more in Heaven is dwelling,
One more redeemed the chorus swelling,
To praise the great Eternal.

LESSON CLII

1SIS'Y PHUS, (in mythology,) a king of Corinth, son of Æolus, famed for his cunning. He was killed by Theseus, and condemned by Pluto to roll to the top of a hill a huge stone, which constantly recoiled, and made his task incessant.

2 HE ROD' O TUS, a native of Halicarnassus, a Dorian city in Asia Minor, was born 484 B.C. He has been styled the "Father of History." To collect the necessary materials for his great work, he visited almost every part of Greece and its dependencies, and many other countries, investigating minutely the history, manners, and customs of the people. His history consists of nine books, which bear the names of the Nine Muses. Next to the Iliad and Odyssey, the history of Herodotus is one of the greatest works of Greek literary genius.

'DI O DO RUS, a famous Greek historian, first century B.C., was the author of a universal history of forty books, of which only fifteen and some fragments are extant.

THE SPHINX AND THE GREAT PYRAMID.

REV. S. I. PRIME.

S we approached the edge of the desert, we encountered

a storm of sand that was borne through the air, and cut off all view of the Pyramids until we were almost upon them. At length, we see them in the midst of this mysterious cloud, sublime and solemn, the mighty memorials of a dim and distant past. They are even more sublime as we now behold them in the sands of the desert, which

seems to be aroused like the ocean, and is rising and curling around the heads of these hoary sentinels.

2. The sand-storm became so furious, that some of the beasts refused to proceed against it, and actually turned around, and headed the other way, until its violence was past. Happily, it was of short continuance; and it afforded us a fine opportunity of witnessing one of those terrible commotions, which, when encountered on the desert, often prove terribly fatal to the unhappy caravans they overtake. The storm is over; the sun returns. Before us are the Pyramids, and in their midst the mighty SPHINX looking out upon the plain.

3. I confess to a strange, almost superstitious feeling as I halted before the Sphinx, and gazed upward on this silent and mighty monument, a huge form, rising sixty feet from the ground, one hundred and forty feet long, and the head more than a hundred feet in circumference, with mutilated but yet apparent human features, looking out toward the fertile land and the Nile. It suddenly impressed me as it were indeed the divinity of ancient Egypt. The Arabs of the present day call it "The Father of Terror," or immensity.

4. An ignorant people might be easily tempted to regard it with reverence and fear. In its state of pristine perfection, no single statue in Egypt could have vied with it. When the lower part of the figure, which had been covered up with the sand, was at length uncovered for a while by the laborious and Sisyphus1-like toil, (the sand slipping down almost as fast as it could be removed,) it presented the appearance of an enormous couchant Sphinx, with gigantic paws, between which crouched, as if for protection, a miniature temple, with a platform and flights of steps for approaching it, with others leading down from the plain above.

5. A crude brick wall protected it from the sand. It is hardly possible to conceive a more strange and imposing spectacle than it must have formerly presented to the worshiper, advancing as he did along this avenue of approach, confined between the sand-walls of the ravine, and looking up over the temple to the colossal head of the tutelary deity, which beamed down upon him from an altitude of sixty feet with an aspect of god-like benignity.

6. As yet, no entrance has been effected; and it is probably carved from the solid rock. Neither is there reason to suppose that it had relation to the Pyramids, in whose vicinity it stands. I think it very strange that Herodotus makes no mention of the Sphinx, nor Diodorus,3 nor, indeed, any ancient author before the Roman age, though its great antiquity is well established by the inscriptions that are found upon it.

7. The statue seems to be crumbling; and the head has been so mutilated, that the cap which formerly covered it, and the beard, are nearly all gone. I rode around it, and then walked out on the wave of sand to the pedestal, and crept along as nearly under the monster as I could get, and found that the sense of veneration wore away as I became familiar with the mass of stone that stands here so mysteriously, a greater wonder, in my view, than the Pyramids themselves. What is its original design? Who made it? These are questions never to be answered by any thing safer than conjecture.

8. Doubtless the Sphinx was an object of worship, and was carved out of a rock in the Lybian range for that purpose. Viewed in this light, or even in the dim twilight of utter ignorance, as to its design, it certainly remains the most mysterious and impressive of the monuments of Egypt. If these lips could speak, what a story would

they tell! If these eyes could see, on what wondrous scenes they would have looked in the four thousand years that those stone orbs have been gazing upon the plains of Egypt the rising and retiring of her wonderful river, coming like a divinity to prepare her bosom for the seed, and then retiring that the flower and fruits may gladden the soil, and reward the laborer's toil.

9. SIZE OF THE GREAT PYRAMID. Have you ever stood in the center of a twelve-acre lot? Mark off in your mind's plantation twelve acres, and cover the ground with layers of huge hewn stone, so nicely fitted that the joints can scarcely be discerned. Over this platform, but two feet within the outer edge, put on another layer, and another, leaving but a single narrow passage into a few smaller chambers in the far interior of this immense mass, that rises by gradually diminishing layers as it ascends, till it reaches an apex twice the hight of the loftiest churchspire in New York, and you have some idea of the outer dimensions of the Great Pyramid.

10. At the first sight of this long-expected wonder, we are not instantly overwhelmed with the magnitude of the pile. It takes some time to adjust one's mind to the object; and probably not one man in a thousand would believe that this pyramid covers five, much less that it covers ten, and even twelve or thirteen, acres of earth. But it is even so. And, as greatness and mystery are elements of the highest sublimity, we are excited the longer we contemplate these mighty structures, and strive to get them fairly within the grasp of the mind. They grow every moment we look upon them. They begin to take us in, and we feel ourselves gradually absorbed by the grandeur of the monument that forbids, yet invites us to enter its mysterious portals.