that all is done, and he is limited to its enjoyment and transmission-he must feel that history has not yet begun to be written, that the first song is hardly sung; that the sun of science is not yet risen; that 'tis but her gray morning; that the language of God to him is,-"I give you the universe a virgin to-day." Against the scholar has been laid the grave charge that his labor is unproductive; but how false the charge. "Take care of the scholars or they will take care of themselves and of you too,” said one to a distinguished English civilian. Says a brilliant essayist, "When the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet, then all things are at risk."
The thought precedes the action. Great actors are often but the personification-the embodiment of some idea, some single thought, which some obscure thinker originated and patented for immortality. There have ever been some leading thoughts, the birth of scholars, pilots of their own generation-certain luminous truths-pillars of cloud and of fire which have guided and guarded humanity in all the journey of its pilgrimage. It was conquest at Rome, refinement at Greece, religion under Constance. The crusades were nurtured into life by Peter the hermit; of the reformation, Luther was the soul.
Scholars are not mere consumers; they are the agriculturists of mind -the manufacturers of nature-toilers in the mines of truth-chemists who, through the world, have fixed points where all truth aggregatescenters of crystalization around which are forming, under the laws of nature gems of radiant beauty and priceless worth, which they bequeath to mankind as the rich legacy of their lives.
But were they no producers, we could well afford to support a few scholars to irradiate this darkened world-to assure us of the dignity of our nature, of the subjection of matter to mind-to point at, in our evening sky, as the galaxy of country, the glory of our age.
TWILIGHT Sinks o'er the city Babylon.
Still glows the westering pathway of the sun,
That lately vanished; and encircling round
The crescent moon, like wreaths of gossamer,
The silver clouds float light and motionless.
The summer breezes wanton 'mid the bowers
Of the ærial gardens. Shadowy groves
Of waving palm from sunny Araby, ·
Of parasitic betel twining round
The cocoa's feathery bough, and cinnamon
And golden citron brought from coral Ind,
Breathe fragrant odors on the drowsy air.
The broad Euphrates rolls its sullen flood
Between its massive banks, as though it were,
As e'en it is, the life, the heartblood of
Great Babylon. Enshrined within its calm,
Transparent depths, from either side arise
Assyria's stupendous palaces.
Gigantic colonnades, full featly hewn
In many a marble peristyle sublime,
And terrace above terrace, with their rows
Of massy balustrades, surmount each other
In regal grandeur, till the loftiest towers
And golden pinnacles the eye may scan
Are lit up by Astarte's setting beams.
Within 'tis one continuous labyrinth
Of light arcades and corridors and halls;
And gorgeous draperies rich with Tyrian dye,
And looped with jeweled clasps in heavy folds,
Wave round the carved pilasters. Sculptures rare
Adorn the walls, which speak the hunter deeds
Of Amazonian Semiramis and
The royal Ninus. Fountains, trelliced o'er
With golden net-work, rise, like magic, from
The tesselated pavement, and their streams
Of laughing waters sparkle in the flash
Of myriad torches, pensile from the high
And fretted arches. In a rich alcove,
Just seen in glimpses through the windings dim,
Mysterious, of the marvellous halls, upon
A couch enwrought of Libyan ivory
Belshazzer sits, his royal visage veiled
In clouds of odorous incense. Warblings faint,
And sweet as when the blithesome choristers
Of Eden first essayed their tuneful notes,
Float soft and dream-like through the airy domes,
Vibrations wild of viol, harp and lyre.
Belshazzer is the skilled musician's theme.
And louder yet the symphonies arise,
Until "Belshazzer" peals from hall to hall,
In one vast diapason, and reëchoes
By tower and battlement, and strikes the ear
Of the astrologer on Belus' height-
Who turns him from his mystic reverie
To hear the universal festal din.
And thus the merry hours unheeded fly.
Careless alike, the drunken sentinel,
The monarch and his slave, all scorn the thought
Of Cyrus and the Mede's beleaguering host.
'Tis midnight over Babylon the great-
The scene how changed! how awful! how sublime!
The sky, so late serene, is hid with black,
Impenetrable gloom : the whirlwind rides
Upon the driving mist, with fury hurls
Amytis' lofty forests from their roots,
And shakes the golden bed of potent Bel!
The flash of the destroying angel's wing
Sends instantaneous day to murkiest night,
And lights th' embattled clouds with lurid fire.
And peal on peal of thunder presages
The dread arrival of a nation's fall!
Stillness profound usurps the sounds of mirth That swelled erewhile throughout the pillared halls. The sovereign's cheeks are blanched with deathly pallor, And all th' assembled rant of courtier, queen,
And magian, fall back struck with nameless awe;
And every eye, with fascinated gaze,
Is fixed upon the wall, where—fearful sight
An unknown hand indites in words of flame,
Inscriptions strange, whose import deep defies
Th' appalled,magician's vaunted arts. Alone,
In all the majesty of age, his heart
Undaunted, and his countenance unmoved
'Mid that tumultuous storm of human fears,
The prophet stands. He speaketh, and his words
Sound pleasant to the breathless multitude
As summer rain upon a sterile soil;
For oh! how sweet another's voice, when fear
Of things unearthly grasps poor, trembling man.
'Twas thus the sage outspake: "Belshazzer! know
That yon prophetic writ reveals too true
That the Supernal mandate's given; the just,
Omnipotent tribunals seals the doom,
That shall consign thine empire and thyself
To mute oblivion"-he said; and then
Belshazzar cries, "Slaves, bring our princely gift,
The promised mead to the diviner's skill!"
But while he speaks, along the vaulted roofs The cry rings wild and high," the foe! the foe!"
Wail! yefchaldean daughters, wail! and rend Your locks unkempt, give loose to your despair, When thus to stem the broad Euphrates course, To beard the lion in his den, to snare
The eagle in his eyrie Iran dares,
And scorns the brazen gates and ramparts towering
E'en unto heaven, and slays your sceptred king!
Ah! woful morn whose inauspicious hour
Beheld the murky sun loom dimly up,
To view a star departing from its blaze-
Assyria's fortune waning in a night,
Her boasted dynasty o'erthrown forever,
And Persia rampant o'er her fallen pride!
Oh how insufferable the simoon
That bloweth, warm as the Chimera's breath,
Along this parched waste! The dingy sun
Slow wheeling, right up in the hazy sky,
Rains vivid fire upon the treeless scene.
No cooling shade or shadow falleth here,
Except the stealthy lion's dusky form
Pictured at noon-day on the arid soil-
Or of the carrion vulture sailing round
In dizzy circles o'er some putrid corse-
The only cloud opaque eclipsing here
The orb of day. For not as in those climes
Salubrious where the showers of April beckon
The wee forget-me-not to heaven's pure light,
Do clouds diversify this wilderness.
When nears the level horizon the sun,
Then lieth long the shadow of yon mounds-
The rugged barrows those, which mark but too
Significantly the drear sepulchre
Of a proud race and city famed of eld-
And with a leaden flow a river winds
Its sluggish stream along the wreck strewn plain.
High on the lonely height of Birs Nimroud,
The genius Ahriman has set his throne.
The demon foul who laugheth o'er the wilds
Of desolate Persepolis, who spurns
The fabled wealth of lost Passargada,
And overthrew the hundred gates of Thebes.
His hand unfurls the standard black that marshals
War, sorrow, pestilence and direful crime-
The cohorts fell of sin o'er all the world.
At night the soorau of this spectral train
In phantom state sits on the crumbling site
Of Babel's shrine: and in the ghastly moonlight
White troops of blear-eyed ghosts dance grinning round,
To the hyena's chilling piercing howl,
And the lone hoot-owl's midnight song of woe!
And this is Babylon! the Queen of eities!
Whose turrets seemed to rake the stars of heaven,
Whose walls were strong as adamant, whose name
Was feared from Phoenice to the sacred Ganges.
She that sent forth her bristling hosts to war,
Her serried ranks to laureled victory.
She was the world's emporium; hither flocked
The white-sailed triremes, bearing 'neath their decks
Sweet sandal wood, and gems, and pearls, and fruits,
And singing birds, from ocean's storied isles.
Time unresisted sealed her parapets,
And undermined her costliest palaces;
And then the flitting dust of mother earth,
Blown to and fro by every shifting wind,
Sufficed to bury all her splendid piles
From mortal sight. We think of her as of
A dream escaping from the memory
When one awakes, as of some fairy myth
By fancy decked to captivate the mind.
And they that triumphed here for centuries,
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