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considerable 'modifications in the scenery. For the most part the river is shut in by hills of granite and sandstone. The valley between these is arid, barren, sun-baked. It has the dull, leaden aspect of a desert. A few stunted palms are the only traces of vegetation that the eye can discover. Cultivation is nearly impossible, except here and there within a narrow strip of land on either side of the river. In some parts it is painfully carried on by means of 'irrigation—the water-wheels being worked by oxen, on whose labours those of the husbandman depend for success.

He

The traveller now finds himself beyond the domain of history; and though he constantly passes both town and temple in neverending series, he knows of no interest connected with them apart from that which usually attaches to the ruins of the past. feels now that the Nile itself is the greatest marvel of his journey; which, although rolling along at the distance of eight hundred miles from the sea, has lost nothing of its volume or its majesty.

At this long distance from the coast of the Mediterranean he arrives at Ipsambul, or Abou-Simbel. Here, on the 'confines of the pathless and unpeopled desert, stands one of Egypt's most striking marvels-the Temple of the Sun, built by Rameses,11 whose gigantic statue sits there in the 'solitude, still unbroken, and revealed from head to foot. This statue is repeated four times two are buried in the sand, and the third is overthrown and in fragments; but from the fourth still looks down the face of the greatest man of the old world, who flourished long before the rise of Greece and Rome-the first conqueror recorded in history--the glory of Egypt, the terror of Asia-the second founder of Thebes, which must have been to the world then what Rome was in the days of her empire.

"The chief thought," says Dean Stanley, "that strikes one at Ipsambul, and elsewhere, is the rapidity of transition in Egyptian worship from the sublime to the ridiculous. The gods alternate between the majesty of antediluvian angels and the grotesqueness of pre-Adamite monsters. By what strange contradiction could the same sculptors and worshippers have conceived the grave and awful forms of Ammon 12 and Osiris, 13 and the 'ludicrous images of gods in all shapes 'in the heavens and in the earth, and in the waters under the earth,' with heads of hawk, and crocodile, and jackal, and ape? What must have been the mind and muscle of a nation who could worship, as at Thebes, in the assemblage of hundreds of colossal Pashts-the sacred cats?

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"And again: how extraordinary the contrast of the 'serenity and the savageness of the kings! Rameses, with his placid smile, grasping the shrieking captives by the hair, is the frontispiece of every temple; and Ammon, with a smile no less placid, is giving him the falchion to smite them. The whole impression is that gods and men alike belong to an age and world entirely passed away, when men were slow to move, slow to think; but that when they did move or think, their work was done with the force and violence of giants. One emblem there is of true monotheism14. -a thousand times repeated-always 'impressive and always beautiful-chiefly on the roof and cornice, like the cherubim in the Holy of Holies-the globe with its wide-spread wings of azure blue, of the all-embracing sky: 'Under the shadow of Thy wings shall be my refuge.'

Beyond Ipsambul, the Nile comes floating, not through mountain passes, but through an absolute desert. The second cataract, by stopping the navigation, terminates the explorations of ordinary travellers; nor is there much beyond to tempt inquiry. In the dim distance two isolated mountains mark the route to Dongola, and they are often veiled in the clouds of sand driven upwards by the winds over the wide expanse of the desert.

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in the twelfth century, who distinguished | called also Sesostris, who conquered Arahimself in the time of the Crusades.

8 Ibises. The ibis (a wading bird) was held sacred by the Egyptians.

9

Sarcophagus, a stone coffin. (See lesson on Cairo and the Pyramids, Note 9.) The plural, sarcophagi, is used two lines below.

10 The bull Apis.-See lesson on Cairo and the Pyramids, Note 11.

11 Rameses.-The third of that name,

bia, Asia Minor, Persia, and India. He is said to have flourished about 1618 B. C.

12 Ammon, the chief god of the Thebans, to whose worship the temples of Luxor and Karnac were dedicated.

13 Osiris, the supreme god of the ancient Egyptians, sometimes identified with the sun, and commonly worshipped under the symbol of a sacred bull called Apis. 14 Monotheism, belief in a single God.

QUESTIONS.-What makes Egypt a habitable country? How far has the course of the Nile been traced? What is the breadth of the cultivable Nile Valley? For what has that valley always been famous? Upon what is its fruitfulness consequent ? When does the river begin to rise? What causes the inundation? When is it at its highest? When is the land tilled? When is the harvest reaped? How many crops are sometimes obtained in one year? What crops are chiefly grown? What is the capital of Lower Egypt? What is its character? Where are the ruins of the ancient city? When was it destroyed? What are the two modes of reaching Cairo? From what point are the Pyramids first seen? What was the ancient capital of Lower Egypt? Where are its ruins? What were recently discovered there? How far is the first cataract above Thebes? How many cataracts are there? What generally shuts in the Nile Valley in Nubia? What is the character of the country there? How is cultivation there carried on? What, above this, is the greatest marvel to be seen? What remarkable place stands eight hundred miles from the Mediterranean? What great temple is at Ipsambul? And what gigantic statue?

THE LADY OF THE LAKE.*

The scene of this poem is laid in the vicinity of Loch Katrine, in the Highlands of Scotland.-Time, about 1530.

PART I.

A SOLITARY huntsman, who had 'outstripped his comrades, and missed the stag he was pursuing, was brought to a sudden halt by the death of his horse, from 'exhaustion, in the heart of the Trosachs. He blew a loud blast of his horn, to recall the hounds, now crippled and sulky, from their vain pursuit. He then hied on foot, to search for any of the hunting party who might be near. Yet he often paused on his way, so strange and wondrous were the scenes around him.

The western waves of ebbing day
Rolled o'er the glen their level way;
Each purple peak, each flinty spire,
Was bathed in floods of living fire.
But not a setting beam could glow
Within the dark ravine below,
Where twined the path, in shadow hid,
Round many a rocky 'pyramid,
Shooting abruptly from the dell
Its thunder-splintered 'pinnacle.

* Abridged from The Scott Reader, in Nelsons' ROYAL SCHOOL SERIES,

With boughs that quaked at every breath,
Gray birch and aspen wept beneath;
Aloft, the ash and warrior oak
Cast anchor2 in the rifted rock;
And, higher yet, the pine-tree hung
His shattered trunk, and frequent flung,
Where seemed the cliffs to meet on high,
His boughs athwart the narrowed sky.
Highest of all, where white peaks glanced,
Where glistening streamers waved and danced,
The wanderer's eye could barely view
The summer heaven's 'delicious blue;
So wondrous wild, the whole might seem
The scenery of a fairy dream......

And now, to issue from the glen,
No pathway meets the wanderer's ken,
Unless he climb, with footing nice,
A far 'projecting precipice.

The broom's tough roots his ladder made,
The hazel saplings lent their aid;
And thus an airy point he won,

Where, gleaming with the setting sun,
One 'burnished sheet of living gold,
Loch Katrine lay beneath him rolled ;-
In all her length far winding lay,
With promontory, creek, and bay;
And islands that, empurpled bright,
Floated amid the livelier light;
And mountains, that like giants stand,
To sentinel enchanted land.

High on the south, huge Ben-venue 3
Down on the lake in masses threw

Crags, knolls, and mounds, confusedly hurled,-
The fragments of an earlier world;

A 'wildering forest feathered o'er

His ruined sides and summit hoar;

While on the north, through middle air,
Ben-an1 heaved high his forehead bare.

Having gazed for a time in rapture and amazement on this scene, he descended towards the lake, and again sounded his bugle, in the hope of signalling some straggler of the hunting train.

But scarce again his horn he wound,
When, lo! forth starting at the sound,
From underneath an aged oak,
That slanted from the islet rock,
A damsel guider of its way,
A little skiff shot to the bay,

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