VII.

The Landscape.

THE Nile landscape is not monotonous, although of one general character. In that soft air the lines change constantly, but imperceptibly, and are always so delicately lined and drawn, that the eye swims satisfied along the warm tranquillity of the scenery.

Egypt is the valley of the Nile. At its widest part it is, perhaps, six or seven miles broad, and is walled upon the west by the Libyan mountains, and upon the east by the Arabian. The scenery is simple and grand. The forms of the landscape harmonize with the forms of the impression of Egypt in the mind. Solemn and still and inexplicable sits that antique mystery among the flowery fancies and broad green fertile feelings of your mind and contemporary life, as the sphinx sits upon the edge of the grain-green plain. No scenery is grander in its impression, for none is so symbolical. The land seems to have died with the race that made it famous-it is so solemnly still. Day after day unrolls to the eye the perpetual panorama of fields wide-waving with the tobacco, and glittering with the golden-blossomed cotton, among which half

naked men and women are lazily working. Palm-groves stand, each palm a poem, brimming your memory with beauty. You know from Sir Gardiner Wilkinson, whose volumes are here your best tutor, that you are passing the remains of ancient cities, as the Ibis loiters languidly before the rising and falling north wind, or is wearily drawn along by the crew filing along the shore. An occasional irregular reach of mounds and a bit of crumbling wall distract imagination as much with the future as the past, straining to realize the time when New York shall be an irregular reach of mounds, or a bit of crumbling wall.

Impossible? Possibly. But are we so loved of time, we petted youngest child, that the fate of his eldest gorgeous Asia, and Africa, its swart mysterious twin shall only frown at us through them and fly?

The austere Arabian mountains leave Cairo with us, and stretch in sad monotony of strength along the Eastern shore. There they shine sandily, the mighty advanced guard of the desert. "Here," say they, and plant their stern feet forever, and over their shoulders sweep and sing the low wild winds from mid Arabia, "sand-grains outnumbering all thy dear drops of water are behind us, to maintain our might and subdue thee, fond, fair river!"

But it glides unheeded at their base, lithely swinging its long unbroken phalanx of sweet water-waving gently against the immovable cliffs like palm branches of peace against a foe's serried front.

Presently the Libyan heights appear, and the river is invested. A sense of fate then spells you, and you feel

that the two powers must measure their might at last, and go forward to the cataract with the feeling of one who shall behold terrible battles.

Yet the day, mindful only of beauty, lavishes all its light upon the mighty foes, adorning them each impartially for its own delight. Along the uniform Arabian highland, it swims and flashes, and fades in exquisite hues, magically making it the sapphire wall of that gárden◄ of imagination, which fertile Arabia is; or in the full gush of noon standing it along the eastern horizon as an image of those boundless deserts, which no man can conceive, more than the sea, until he beholds them.

But the advancing desert consumes cities of the river, so that fair fames of eldest history are now mere names. Even the perplexed river sweeps away its own, but reveals richer reaches of green land for the old lost, and Arabia and Lybia are foiled forever. Forever, for it must be as it has been, until the fertility of the tropics that floats seaward in the Nile, making the land of Egypt as it goes, is exhausted in its source.

But there is a profounder charm in the landscape, a beauty that grows more slowly into the mind, but is as perfect and permanent. Gradually the Howadji perceives the harmony of the epical, primitive, and grand character of the landscape, and the austere simplicity of the Egyptian art. Fresh from the galleries of Europe, it is not without awe that he glides far behind our known beginnings of civilization, and standing among its primeval forms, realizes the relation of nature and art.

There is no record of any thing like lyrical poetry in the

history of the elder Egyptians. somber substance of their life. Howadji sees before he reads.

Their theology was the This fact of history the

Nature is only epical here. She has no little lyrics of green groves, and blooming woods, and sequestered lanesno lonely pastoral landscape. But from every point the Egyptian could behold the desert heights, and the river, and the sky. This grand and solemn Nature has imposed upon the art of the land, the law of its own being and beauty. Out of the landscape, too, springs the mystery of Egyptian character, and the character of its art. For silence is the spirit of these sand mountains, and of this sublime sweep of luminous sky-and silence is the mother of mystery. Primitive man so surrounded, can then do nothing but what is simple and grand. The pyramids reproduce the impression and the form of the landscape in which they stand. The pyramids say, in the Nature around them, "Man, his mark."

Later, he will be changed by a thousand influences, but can never escape the mystery that haunts his home, and will carve the Sphinx and the strange mystical Memnon. The Sphinx says to the Howadji what Egypt said to the Egyptian-and from the fascination of her face streams all the yearning, profound and pathetic power that is the soul of the Egyptian day.

So also from the moment the Arabian highlands appeared, we had in their lines and in the ever graceful and suggestive palms, the grand elements of Egyptian archi

tecture. Often in a luminously blue day as the Howadji sits reading or musing before the cabin, the stratified sand mountain side, with a stately arcade of palms on the smooth green below, floats upon his eye through the serene sky as the ideal of that mighty Temple which Egyptian architecture struggles to realize-and he feels that he beholds the seed that flowered at last in the Parthenon and all Greek architecture.

The beginnings seem to have been, the sculpture of the hills into their own forms,-vast regular chambers cut in the rock or earth, vaulted like the sky that hung over the hills, and like that, starred with gold in a blue space.

From these came the erection of separate buildingsbut always of the same grand and solemn character. In them the majesty of the mountain is repeated. Man cons the lesson which Nature has taught him.

Exquisite details follow. The fine flower-like forms and foliage that have arrested the quick sensitive eye of artistic genius, appear presently as ornaments of his work. Man as the master, and the symbol of power, stands calm with folded hands in the Osiride columns. Twisted water reeds and palms, whose flowing crests are natural capitals, are added. Then the lotus and acanthus are wreathed around the columns, and so the most delicate detail of the Egyptian landscape re-appeared in its art.

But Egyptian art never loses this character of solemn sublimity. It is not simply infancy, it was the law of its life. The art of Egypt never offered to emancipate itself from this character,-it changed only when strangers

came.