"All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, "Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; Upon a painted ocean. "Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; The one man who is the chronicler of all, and to whose fate everything refers is never withdrawn from our attention for a moment. He is, as it were, the epitome of human kind, the emblem of the sinner and sufferer shut up within those rotting bulwarks, beneath those sails so thin and sear. The awful trance of silence in which his being is involved,—a silence of awe and pain, yet of a dumb, enduring, unconquerable force,— descends upon us, and takes possession of our spirits also: no loud bassoon, no festal procession can break the charm of that intense yet passive consciousness. We grow silent with him "with throat unslaked, with black lips baked," in a sympathy which is the very climax of poetic pain. And then what touches of tenderness are those that surprise us in this numbness and trance of awful solitude : "O happy living things! no tongue A spring of love gushed from my heart, Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware. Or this other, which comes after the horror of the reanimated bodies; the ghastly crew of the dead alive :— "For when it dawned, they dropped their arms, And clustered round the mast; Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths, When the tale has reached its height of mystery and emotion, a change ensues :— "It ceased; yet still the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon, A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night "Till noon we quietly sailed on, Yet never a breeze did breathe; Slowly and smoothly went the ship, Moved onward from beneath.' Gradually the greater spell is removed, the spirits depart, the strain softens,-with a weird yet gentle progress the ship comes "slowly and smoothly," without a breeze, back to the known and visible. As the voyage approaches its conclusion, ordinary instrumentalities appear once more : "But soon there breathed a wind on me, Its path was not upon the sea, “It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek, It mingled strangely with my fears, "Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship, "Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed "We drifted o'er the harbor-bar, "like a There is first the rising of the soft, familiar wind, meadow-gale of spring;" then the blessed vision of the lighthouse top, the hill, the kirk,-all those well-known realities which gradually relieve the absorbed excitement of the listener, and favor his slow return to ordinary daylight. And then comes the ineffable, half-childish, half-divine simplicity of those soft moralizings at the end, so strangely different from the tenor of the tale, so wonderfully perfecting its visionary strain. After all (the poet seems to say), after this weird excursion into the very deepest, awful heart of the seas and mysteries, here is your child's moral, a tender little, half-trivial sentiment, yet profound as the blue depths of heaven: "He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; This unexpected, gentle conclusion, brings our feet back to the common soil with a bewildered sweetness of relief and soft quiet after the prodigious strain of mental excitement, which is like nothing else we can remember in poetry. The effect is one rarely produced and which few poets have the strength and daring to accomplish, sinking from the highest notes of spiritual music to the absolute simplicity of exhausted nature. Thus we are set down on the soft grass, in a tender bewilderment, out of the clouds. The visionary voyage is over; we are back again on the mortal soil from which we started; but never more, never again can the visible and invisible bear to us the same meaning. For once in our lives, if never before, we have passed the borders of the unseen. The Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and CESNOLA'S DISCOVERIES IN CYPRUS. GENERAL LOUIS PALMA DI CESNOLA (b. 1832). [General Cesnola (pr. Ches-no-la), at the close of the American Civil War, in which he had served with distinction, was appointed Consul to Cyprus a few days before President Lincoln's tragic death. Cesnola arrived at his post on Christmas-day, 1865, and for the next ten years he devoted himself to the exploration of Cyprian tombs and ruined cities. He found that many centuries ago his search had been anticipated, and that the tombs and temples had been remorselessly pillaged; but he still obtained an immense number of objects highly valuable for the study of the Cyprian language and history. Persevering in his search, Cesnola at length struck into the undisturbed treasure-vaults of an ancient temple at Curium, and here he found a marvellous store of massive and exquisite goldsmith-work. His collection was purchased for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it can be studied with the aid of official catalogues. Simultaneously with Cesnola, the English Consul, R. H. Lang, excavated for antiquities, and he was so fortunate as to discover a bilingual inscription in Phoenician and Cypriote, which unlocked the latter language and proved it to be an archaic form of Greek.] The Curium Treasure. After having measured each room, and searched in vain for some inscription upon the walls, I retraced my steps to the room in which a few weeks before I had discovered the gold ornaments. The layer of earth was searched by my foreman, carefully and delicately with the point of his knife. Afterwards he passed it twice through his fingers. This done, the man with the lantern took away this earth, again examining it, in case anything had been passed unobserved. The fellow-bracelet to that found a month before was soon discovered not far off, in company with two gold signet-rings having scarabs* in agate, with Egyptian representations engraved upon them; also four pairs of ear-rings and many gold beads, some of which were still strung alternately with rock-crystal beads upon a gold wire, and had as a pendant a little rock-crystal vase finely cut. now remarked for the first time the total absence of human remains and sepulchral vases, and concluded that these vaults * Scar'abs; that is, representations of the scarabæus or sacred beetle of the Egyptians. I must have belonged to the building above. Although no statuary or architectural fragments existed above these four rooms, with the exception of the granite columns already mentioned, yet I am convinced that the structure must have been a temple, to which these vaults must have served as treasure-chambers. We know from Strabo that the treasures at Delphi were kept under the temple, and that during the Holy War Onomar'chus* set men to search for them, but that, alarmed by an earthquake, they desisted and fled. In the rubbish removed from the surface of the mosaic were found several scarabs and cylinders in serpentine, with rough carvings upon them; a silver ring and three cylinders were also discovered beneath the mosaic pavement, in the direction of the two stone steps, near a piece of wood, which may have been from its shape part of a ladder. The pavement in each room was inlaid with blue pebbles on a bed of sand and plaster, as is the practice to this day in Cyprus; but even with this precaution the vaults must have been always damp, and unfit to be permanent repositories for such valuable objects. I was satisfied, by the way in which the stone slab had been carelessly or hurriedly replaced before the entrance, that whatever was to be found in those vaults would be objects which had been left behind under some unexplained circumstances. While reflecting thus, I was agreeably interrupted by an exclamation from my foreman, who, rising from his reclining position, handed me two gold armlets, weighing over two pounds; but what to my eyes made them much more valuable was the inscription in the Cypriote character, beautifully engraved on the inner side of each. The Cypriote inscriptions hitherto found in the western part of the island are read from left to right. That on the gold armlets consists of thirteen letters or characters, divided by a perpendicular line into two groups, of which the first is Eteandros, the name of a king of Paphos, who probably offered these armlets to some divinity in that temple. There can hardly be a doubt that this Eteandros, king of Paphos, is the same whose name occurs under the form of Ithuander, in the list of Cypriote kings who brought tribute to the Assyrian monarch Esarhaddon (B.C. 672). Besides the massive gold armlets already described, there are *The Third Sacred War in Greek history arose out of the cultivation of a certain waste and "accursed" tract by the Phocians. Onomar'chus became the Phocian leader B.C. 353. |