number of lives I have saved on this river. How, then, can you say, master, I show fear?”

Well, if you do not, the others do," retorted Frank. "Neither are they or am I afraid. We believe the river to be impassable in a canoe. I have only to beckon to my men, and they will follow me to death; and it is death to go down this cataract. We are now ready to hear you command us to go; and we want your promise that if anything happens, and our master asks, 'Why did you do it?' you will bear the blame."

"No, I will not order you. I will have nothing to do with it. You are the chief in this canoe. If you like to go, go, and I will say you are men, and not afraid of the water. If not, stay, and I shall know it is because you are afraid.

It appears

to me easy enough, and I can advise you. I don't see what could happen."

Thus challenging the people to show their mettle, poor Frank steadily hastened his fate.

Vledi then turned to the crew, and said, "Boys, our little master is saying that we are afraid of death. I know there is death in the cataract; but come, let us show him that black men fear death as little as white men. What do you say?"

"A man can die but once," "Who can contend with his fate?" "Our fate is in the hands of God!" were the various answers he received.

Enough; take your seats," Vledi said.

"You are men!" cried Frank, delighted at the idea of soon reaching camp.

66

Bismillah" (in the name of God), "let go the rocks, and shove off," cried the cockswain.

"Bismillah!" echoed the crew, and they pushed away from the friendly cove.

In a few seconds they had entered the river, and, in obedience to Frank, Vledi steered his craft for the left side of the river. But it soon became clear that they could not reach it. There was a greasy slipperiness about the water that was delusive, and it was irresistibly bearing them broadside over the falls. And observing this, Vledi turned the prow, and boldly bore down for the centre. Roused from his seat by the increasing thunder of the fearful waters, Frank rose to his feet, and looked over the heads of those in front; and now the full danger of his situation seemed to burst on him. But too late! They had reached the fall, and plunged headlong amid the waves and spray.

The angry waters rose and leaped into their vessel, spun them round as though on a pivot; and so down over the curling, dancing, leaping crests they were borne, to the whirlpools which yawned below. Ah! then came the moment of anguish, regret, and terror. "Hold on to the canoe, my men! seize a rope, each one ! " said he, while tearing his flannel shirt away. Before he could prepare himself, the canoe was drawn down into the abyss, and the whirling, flying waters closed over all. When the vacuum was filled, a great body of water was belched upwards, and the canoe was disgorged into the bright sunlight, with several gasping men clinging to it. When they had drifted a little distance away from the scene, and had collected their faculties, they found there were only eight of them alive! and, alas for us who were left to bewail his sudden doom! there was no white face among them. But presently, close to them, another commotion, another heave and belching of waters, and out of them the insensible form of the "little master" appeared; and they heard a loud moan from him. Then Vledi, forgetting his late escape from the whirling pit, flung out his arms and struck gallantly towards him; but another pool sucked them both in, and the waves closed over them before he could reach him; and for the second time the brave cockswain emerged, faint and weary, but Frank Pocock was seen no more.

"My brave, honest, kindly-natured Frank, have you left me so? Oh, my long-tried friend, what fatal rashness!—Ah, Vledi, had you but saved him, I should have made you a rich man!" "Our fate is in the hands of God, master," replied he, sadly and wearily. Through the Dark Continent (1878).

THREE SONNETS ON THE NILE.

SHELLEY: HUNT: KEATS.

["The Wednesday before last, Shelley, Hunt, and I, wrote each a sonnet on the river Nile. Some day you shall read them all."-JOHN KEATS, letter to his brother, February 16, 1818.

Shelley's sonnet above referred to was identified only in 1876, when it was discovered by Mr. Townshend Mayer among Shelley's manuscripts.—St. James's Magazine, March and April 1876.

This trial of strength between the three poets added to English literature a most interesting group of sonnets, which are particularly valuable to the student, for purposes of analysis and comparison. Shelley, however, is not at his best in sonnets, nor is this the best of Shelley's sonnets. His greatest achievement in this field is Ozymandias, which is here added for the purpose of comparative study.]

1. To the Nile.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822).

Month after month the gathered rains descend,
Drenching yon secret Æthiopian dells;

And from the desert's ice-girt pinnacles,
Where frost and heat in strange embraces blend
On Atlas, fields of moist snow half depend.

Girt there with blasts and meteors, Tempest dwells
By Nile's aërial urn, with rapid spells

Urging those waters to their mighty end.

O'er Egypt's land of memory floods are level,
And they are thine, O Nile; and well thou knowest
That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil,
And fruits and poisons spring where'er thou flowest.
Beware, O man-for knowledge must to thee
Like the great flood to Egypt ever be.

2. The Nile.

JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT (1784-1859).

It flows through old hushed Ægypt and its sands,
Like some grave, mighty thought threading a dream;
And times and things, as in that vision, seem
Keeping along it their eternal stands,—

Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands

That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,

The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands. Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,

As of a world left empty of its throng,

And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,
And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
Our own calm journey on for human sake.

3. To the Nile.

JOHN KEATS (1796-1821).

Foliage (1818).

Son of the old Moon Mountains African!
Stream of the pyramid and crocodile!
We call thee fruitful, and that very while
A desert fills our seeing's inward span:
Nurse of swart nations since the world began,
Art thou so fruitful? or dost thou beguile
Those men to honour thee, who, worn with toil,
Rest them a space 'twixt Cairo and Decan?

O may dark fancies err! They surely do;
"Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste
Of all beyond itself. Thou dost bedew

Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste
The pleasant sunrise. Green isles hast thou too,
And to the sea as happily dost haste.

TIBER, NILE, AND THAMES.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (1828-1882).

[This sonnet was evidently suggested by the erection on the Thames Embankment of " Cleopatra's Needle," one of two obelisks that were transferred by the Romans from Heliopolis to Alexandria. The remaining obelisk has been removed to New York, and set up in Central Park.]

The head and hands of murdered Cicero
Above his seat high in the Forum hung,

Drew jeers and burning tears; when on the rung
Of a swift-mounted ladder, all aglow,
Fulvia, Mark Antony's shameless wife, with show
Of foot firm-poised and gleaming arm upflung,
Bade her sharp needle pierce that god-like tongue
Whose speech fed Rome even as the Tiber's flow.
And thou, Cleopatra's Needle, that hadst thrid
Great skirts of Time ere she and Antony hid

Dead hope!--hast thou too reached, surviving death,
A city of sweet speech scorned- -on whose chill stone
Keats withered, Coleridge pined, and Chatterton,
Breadless, with poison froze the God-fired breath?

OZYMANDIAS.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822).

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said, Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing besides remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

(1817.)

THE ANCIENT KINGS OF EGYPT.

MISS AMELIA B. EDWARDS (b. 1831).

[For ten years, in spite of legal penalties, Egyptian antiquities of the greatest value and interest had been reaching Europe from some mysterious source. Professor Maspero, of the Cairo Museum, traced, in 1881, these thefts to an Arab guide and dealer. After two months' imprisonment, and after his brother had disclosed his secret, this Arab led the way to Dayr-elBaharee, on a desolate mountain-side that overlooks the valley of Thebes. Herr Emil Brugsch, acting for Professor Maspero, made the exploration (July 6, 1881), the results of which are so vividly described below.

Miss Edwards' rank as a graceful writer rested, until 1875, on her novels and her contributions to periodical literature. She then published an important book of travel," Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys." Soon afterwards Miss Edwards undertook excavations in Egypt, the place chosen being Aboo-Simbel, forty miles below the second cataract of the Nile; and in 1877 appeared the results of her remarkable discoveries in the illustrated work entitled, "A Thousand Miles up the Nile."]

In the central hall of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities at Boolak,* ranged side by side, shoulder to shoulder, lies a solemn company of kings, queens, princes, and priests of royal blood, who died and were made imperishable flesh by the embalmer's art between three and four thousand years ago. These royal personages are of different dynasties and widely separate periods. Between the earliest and the latest there intervenes a space of time which may be roughly estimated at seven centuries and a half. This space of time (about equivalent to that which divides the Norman Conquest from the accession of George III.) covers the rise and fall of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first dynasties.† During these four dynasties occurred the expulsion of the Hyksos invaders, the Asiatic conquests of Thothmes III., of Seti I., of Ramses II., the oppression and exodus of the Hebrews, and the defeat of the allied Mediterranean fleets by Ramses III. To the same period belong the great temples of Thebes, the sepulchres in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, the obelisks of Hatasu, the rock-cut temples of Aboo-Simbel, and the Colossi of the Plain. In a word, all the military glory and nearly all the architectural splendor of ancient Egypt are comprised within the limits thus indicated.

* A suburb of Cairo.

Seventeenth dynasty, about B.C. 1750-1703; eighteenth, B.C. 1703-1462; nineteenth, B.C. 1462-1288; twentieth, B.C. 1288-1110; twenty-first, succeeded about B.C. 1140.