no Frankish explorer had even suspected, and which those of his own mystic line had always shrunk from entering. He had been led to its threshold once, long years ago, by his ancestor, who suffered him to look within, but not to enter. This ancestor declared to Achmet that the disclosure had been handed down to himself in precisely the same solemn manner, and with the like solemn adjuration, never to touch with foot or hand the stony floor inside the door.

I lent a greedy ear to Achmet's assertion; for, as I related, I had long felt a conviction that former explorers had turned away from the Great Pyramid and its mystery, satisfied that the whole had been revealed in the single little apartment and the empty sarcophagus.

He yielded to my will, and consented, though reluctantly, to become iny guide to the Mystery of the Great Cheops-so is it called.

I assented to his entreaty that our expedition should be by night, and that his disclosures should be inviolable secrets. I could with diffi- | culty await the hour, and I paced the earthen floor of our temporary hovel, exalted by hope, but a prey to a strange agitation.

Thick darkness at last crept from the eastward, tardily following the departed sun across the trackless desert and the old Nile. Black clouds drooped from the sky until they seemed to rest upon the very apex of the Pyramid. The moon, a waning crescent, had closely followed the sun in its departure, and not a single star lent its ineffectual ray to cheer the gloomy

scene.

Solemn and awful, charged with the secrets of fifty centuries, stood, in its eternal, imperishable majesty, the PYRAMID.

To my excited ear the gentle night-wind, moaning in snatches across the black, melancholy waste, now sinking, now swelling in volume, brought, as I half-fancied, an articulate, sorrowful warning against the meditated desecration.

Provided with torches, to be lighted when needed, and a few implements, we took our dark way across the sands to the Great Pyramid.

With infinite labour, in the 'darkness, we scaled its side. It was a work of danger even to ourselves; impossible to those not, like us, familiar with every stony step and crevice. The storms of ages had somewhat disintegrated the face of the pile. We attained the entrance long known to travellers, half way up the majestic slope, and into this my guide conducted me. Having progressed a few paces into this narrow and obstructed way, we kindled our torches. They cast a smoky, flickering glare upon the dull, chiselled blocks of stone. Each with flambeau held out before him, to guide his steps through the dismal maze, we went on, without speaking. A multitude of bats, which had taken shelter in the dark crannies overhead, flew out at our approach, and circled around our torches upon their leathery wings, as weird, silent, and ghostly as if they had been indeed the spirits of the dead builders of this stupendous wonder.

The passage was very narrow, and too low,

much of the way, to allow us to walk erect. It was crooked, now turning to the right or left, and now ascending to a higher or descending to a lower level. It was obstructed by sand and rubbish, the debris of the ages.

We had slowly and painfully achieved two hundred feet of our way, as nearly as I could judge, when Achmet halted at an abrupt angle of the passage. We were yet in the well-known way which led to the already discovered apartment, though we had not yet accomplished above half the distance.

Handing his torch to me, my guide raised a heavy iron bar which we had brought, and proceeded to sound the great stones of the wall. These bore the marks of the chisels of the architects as freshly as if they had laid them down at the last sunset, and would take them up and renew their work at the next sunrise. It needed but a moment to satisfy my guide. In response to his blows, every great stone gave forth a dead, solid sound, destitute of elasticity, so to speak, save one, which rang under its blow; it seemed to vibrate almost with the twang of a harp-string!

Now," said my conductor, in a low, hushed voice, "I am about to disclose to your eyes a passage and a secret which, during more than ten centuries, has been traversed by no feet, beholden by no eyes, save two or three of my own race. I know that of this generation I alone possess the secret."

66

He was again silent; he seemed to be oppressed with a superstitious dread, a feeling so common to the dwellers of the sun-burnt East," yet with which the bolder nature of the Anglo-Saxon has but scanty patience. After a brief pause, he inserted the flat, sharp point of the crow between the great square-faced stone and the stony floor whereon we stood. Obedient to no powerful effort, to my amazement, the ponderous block slid slowly backward, or rather inward, as if it were poised upon rollers.

There was revealed a dismal, dust-choked passage or channel, much narrower than that in which we stood. It plunged downwards towards the very foundations of the Pyramid, a steep declivity extending much further, apparently, than our murky torches could project their light.

Looking upon the accumulation of an impalpable dust clinging upon the slope, it was easy to credit this mystic's assertion that, for more than a decade of centuries, no mortal foot had attempted this perilous declivity. Yea, one might believe that it had never been invaded, since the workmen had sealed up the Great Pyramid upon the day whereon great Sesostris, or Rameses, or their sires, had been laid to their eternal sleep within this, their all-enduring, time-defying Home!

My imagination had long been stimulated to an abnormal activity. Now, as we stood in the mouth of this mysterious hollow way, a multitude of conceptions thronged, an endless, a riotous host, through my brain. These imagesfor they possessed that vividness-were without

the control of my will. This was powerless. I could neither direct their course nor tear my mind from the subject.

I was as in a dream. Yet I knew that I dreamed not. But my mental processes then possessed the two distinctive phenomena of dreams -first, my will was without its power of control; secondly, my conceptions, the beings of my heated imagination, took substantial, as it were, real forms, and thronged before me full of a wild, chaotic life.

I retained enough of reason to assure me that the date of my existence was fixed in the nineteenth century; yet in my mental action, in my soul-life, I lived, at that moment, standing in the dark tomb of great Sesostris, in that faroff age, across the dark abyss of time, among those mighty tenants of an infant world who had left such a giant impress upon its face!

The knowledge which I had pursued so arduously, and had gleaned, with other scholars, so laboriously from cryptographic inscriptions all the fragments were, so to speak, fused in the crucible of my super-heated imagination. It sprang into new forms; a new order was produced; links were forged; lost parts of the system were re-created-all instantly and involuntarily; and the whole of that grand civilization, the pomp of a regal priesthood, ministering amid clouds of incense in a thousand gorgeously columned temples; the regal grandeur of Rameses, high enthroned in the grandly restored halls of Karnak, environed by clouds of victoriously returning chieftains, bringing the spoils of a hundred conquered kingdoms, and leading, also, captive to the royal feet, Melek Aiudab, "the King of the Jews," the son of Solomon; old Nile, covered with barks wafted by purple, perfumed sails of silk, and cutting the waters with prows of beaten gold, bearing princesses of dark and gorgeous beauty to the feast or to the temple; the statue of Memnon, upon its gigantic, monolithic throne, and vocal with its glad salute to the rising sun-all, all flooded and oppressed my mind, as with an intolerable weight of splendour, a load which I could not lay down.

I know that, amid it all, a deadly fear shot across my heart, that this state might be the precursor of madness. With this very vision my yet unsubdued reason interwove a dark thread, a memory of some strangely gifted ones, who, having given their studies and their hearts too devotedly to a single subject, had at last made shipwreck of their minds-had shattered the mirror in its focus, so that it gave back but distorted images.

These thoughts, this vision, so to speak, that has taken time in the recital, passed through my mind in two or three minutes.

They occupied only the time while Achmet was busy fastening the end of a long and strong cord, which he had brought to assist our de

scent.

I felt a thrill of joy when he broke in upon my reverie, and aided me to wrench my thoughts back to the now and the here.

We began the perilous descent, each clinging to the rope with one hand, while holding the torch in the other.

The passage plunged to the north, at an angle of forty-five degrees.

Apparently, there were no steps cut in the rock, though we could not distinguish, through the accumulated dust, whether there were any remains of a stairway.

Our safety proved to be in the rope. But for such support, we must have plunged headlong into the abyss of the Pyramid. The passage was no more than three feet wide-sometimes narrower. Often, huge, hewn stones impending overhead so encroached upon the crooked way that we were forced to grope upon hands and knees.

I estimated that we had traversed more than three hundred feet: it had occupied a halfhour.

At length, the perilous descent over, we stood upon a level stone, about eight feet square. Here we were able to stand upright, and rest our cruelly taxed limbs. It was a small, square chamber, about ten feet in altitude, intended, probably, as a resting-place only. The closely confined air was laden with the smoke of our torches, and even now respiration became laboured.

We paused but to replenish our torches. I knew that Achmet had not yet reached the (to him and his race) dread mystery. The moment, however, sufficed for a rapid survey of the walls. They were graven smoothly, and were covered with the characters which blazon every rock in Egypt with a history. They were not chiseled, but painted in vermilion, as bright as if it had been laid on but yesterday.

One of the four walls was nearly covered by a seemingly allegorical picture, upon which I gazed with speechless wonder. Could it be possible that here, in the heart of this pyramid, I beheld the pictured story of the fall of man, as recorded in the Holy Bible? In glowing colours, there shone in the smoky light of our flambeaux a serpent, with human arms and legs, in the act of offering an apple to an Egyptian woman!

I could not tear my eyes from it until Achmet dragged me away, warning me that our torches were not sufficient to permit longer pause here. I recurred with terror to our situation, should we indeed be cut off in the stony heart of the Pyramid, without light!

Achmet again sounded a corner of the wall with the bar. A few experiments disclosed the movable stone. Inserting the point of the iron into the thread-like seam, or juncture, of two polished stones, again the wall, apparently as immovable as the foundations of the mountains, yielded to his skilful effort, and another massive block of stone slid back, as if fixed upon machinery for the purpose!

I stayed not to inspect this contrivance, but fell on my knees, and gazed into the chamber disclosed, with breathless amazement. It was about twelve feet square, and rectangular, its

sides ranging with the cardinal points of the compass. Floor, walls, and roof were each a gigantic monolith. Here was found no rubbish -no dust. It was as clean as if swept but yesterday.

I crept within. A superstitious dread (the religion of Egypt is superstition, and its priests are its sincerest votaries) chained my follower's feet before the threshold. He faltered in a whisper that the spot was under an invisible guardianship, and that, should we enter, the stony door would close behind us for ever.

I half persuaded, half compelled him to follow me. He at length followed my example, and tremblingly crossed the broad threshold.

It was my belief that we were near the base of the Pyramid; yet who can tell how deeply the foundations of this mighty pile penetrate the earth? Explorations, afterwards conducted, throw some light upon that subject now.

Upon every side there were five hundred feet of chiseled stone between us and the open air.

The walls of the apartment were wrought smooth with the chisel. Upon these stony pages were blazoned the deeds of the regal tenant of this narrow room-the story of his conquests and his triumphs.

A monarch of gigantic stature (so was he represented in comparison with the surrounding figures of high and haughty aspect) sat upon a throne, holding upright in his hand a sceptre crowned with a winged globe. To him ap proached, with obsequious mien, stewards of estates, keepers of herds, superintendents of the public granaries, and overseers of captives and slaves, to render up their accounts. In another line, approached the throne, generals leading trains of captives, bringing the spoils of conquered kingdoms.

One incident carved in this triumph smote me dumb with amazement. There approached the monarch a god-crowned and winged, the tutelar deity of old Egypt, leading a train of bound and bowed captives. The artist had caught with fidelity the distinctive features of the various nations. Those of this line were the children of Judah. Over the head of the foremost, who

was of double the stature of the rest, was a cartouche, the oval rim of which was the wall of a fortified city. In it I read with breathless wonder, in pictured symbols, the words "Melek Aiudab, King of the Jews." It was a record of the conquest of Jerusalem and the son of Solomon, read upon the wall of the tomb of the conqueror, written there while the temple of the son of David was yet in its glory. How narrow is this tomb! how silent! Here is rest indeed! the everlasting Sabbath of the grave!

But let us proceed to the discovery of most thrilling interest, the object which chained my eye upon my entrance. I approached it with a feeling of awe. With its head eastward, like that found by Belzoni, upon the centre of the stony floor, reposed a sarcophagus of alabaster; but, unlike that discovered by that traveller, it had never been violated.

It was hewn from a single block, and was eight feet long by four in breadth. It was covered with the same hieroglyphics which loaded the walls. The sharp relievos had not suffered; they were sharp and perfect. What, indeed, could reach them here? The stupendous and rocky bulk of the Pyramid barred the work from the gnawing tooth of time itself!

Within a cartouche upon the lid was the name of the great Sesostris, described in those cryptographic inscriptions, as, "the vindicator of the gods," "the protected of the gods of all classes,” "son of the gods."

It was the great Sesostris whose body slept beneath!

plored. He was a victim of a slavish dread Achmet stood aloof trembling, while I exwhich the Anglo-Saxon mind can hardly comprehend. He dreaded, lest the watchful spirits of the tomb should imprison us within the dark recess forever. He piteously urged that we should now retrace our way, and close the stony could have deterred me now. My imagination recess. But not the prospect of death itself torches were waning. I would have fallen dead bewas on fire. We had no time to waste; the failed of the sight of its inmate. I assumed the side that grand sarcophagus rather than to have mien of the lord and master to the slave. The no danger, fears no odds, quickly bore down haughty Anglo-Saxon soul, which shrinks from the will of the son of the emasculate East. The fever in my blood exalted my will to a tenfold power. He obeyed. I knew he must obey. and we lifted it off. But the face of the mighty I inserted the bar beneath the ponderous lid, monarch was not yet revealed. There issued forth and filled the tomb a pungent but an exceedingly sweet and aromatic odour, which the odour of some substance used by the was wholly strange to me. It was doubtless Egyptians in embalming, an art lost to us, at least in its perfection. Within, there appeared a chest or coffin, of a thin, light, odoriferous wood, of a kind unknown at the present day, Africa may yet furnish to the arts. It must yet which the unexplored equatorial regions of with, essences, which preserved it from the have contained in itself, or have been charged common decay. It was perfect.

I removed the cover of the wooden shell, and there appeared loose layers of papyrus and silk. These were covered with scarabaei, the sacred beetle, in gold. Beneath, appeared the contour of a human form. The body was not wrapped in a multitude of folds of cloth, as are common mummies. The process had been too elaborate and skilful to require such aids. I sat down upon the foot of the sarcophagus, overpowered trembling hands could remove with decency the by my sensations. It was some time before my folds that hid the face of the dead king of that hoary time, the ruler of an infant world.

The face, for more than forty centuries bound in darkness and motionless slumber, was exposed to the light of the torches. I kneeled and

gazed. Achmet muttered heathen spells for his safety.

It was a kingly, a majestic face and head. The lashes of the closed eyes lay upon the cheek as in sleep. Truly it was an iron sleep! The straight, coal-black hair was swept back from the broad brow, and rolled around the neck in a mass. There was an eternal smile frozen upon the full, well-cut lip. The skin was dark, smooth, beardless. The body was not emaciated. The nose was prominent, and hooked, like the beak of an eagle. It was the body of a man of not more than forty years, I thought. He looked as if he might awake from sleep and address the disturbers. But there it lay, how still and majestic! one born to majesty, to exact homage, even in his tomb. He lay, as he had lain five thousand years, from the childhood, through manhood of the world itself, solemn and unchangeable.

with alarm. They would hardly light us back through the labyrinth! We replaced all as we found it, and closed the tomb. The close, smoke-laden air almost stifled respiration. Í resolved to return on the morrow, and to continue the exploration of the Pyramid. There had come upon me a conviction that there were many other avenues, other tombs, which careful search might reveal.

Some other time I may relate the result of these explorations, but not now.

As the sun was rising over the Lybian desert, changing the drifting sands into yellow gold, we stood upon the ground without the Great Pyramid.

As we wended our way across the sands, I strove to recall my soul from the spell that had possessed it. It seemed as if I had slept the sleep of that great king whose form we had just left, and that I had just now awaked. There came upon me a belief, a certainty, that I was to reveal many secrets of that Pyramid, that nothing had yet been accomplished in their exploration. Not one of them was the resting-place of a single

I severed from the temple of the sleeper a lock of the long black hair. I never look upon it without feeling a magnetic thrill. It has a mesmeric power, as one might term it, to bind the imagination, to lead the soul backward out of the present, across that measureless abyss of time, to that far shore whence it has come. The breeze that stirred the palm-branches in Paradise may have waved it upon that kingly front. The lore of that world is dead; its arts lost. Conquerors and conquered are gone. There are left only a few broken wrecks of a civilization the grandest that time ever saw. All, all have returned to that dust which this night-wind scatters over these vast and voiceless solitudes, which once echoed to the tramp of innumerable hosts, whose soil once groaned under the burthen of a hundred great cities.

But the fascination of that royal face, that smile that seemed to hold the riddle which there is no Edipus to solve, had delayed us too long. Our torches had nearly expired. I started

monarch would begin the erection of his own tomb upon the day of his coronation, and behold it progressing throughout all the years of his reign? The largest of these piles were each the work of twenty years or more!

Of the laborious and exciting exploration which I conducted after the day of which I have written, and of their astounding results - disclosures that proved fatal to health-I may write at another time, not now.

A great physician counselled me that the prolongation of such excitement must prove fatal. I fled to the quiet and seclusion of a new country. I left old Egypt for the season, to regain in a new atmosphere a new mind and a new body-sana mens in sano corpore.

Said that great physician, with a parent's sympathy-every great healer must possess it"The atmosphere wherein your mind now lives is exhausting; it is an atmosphere of pure oxygen to the natural body; it is a fiery stimulant; it excites an intense activity, but it consumes the victim quickly." I took counsel, and fled for a season.

The present year has been to us a prolific one in occasions of sorrow. Some of the noblest and most highly-gifted in art and literature have, within the eleven months that are past, written their last line and plied the pencil for the last time. In our land, Thackeray, Leech, and Landor have departed. On the continent the deathroll includes the names of Uhland and Meyerbeer: whilst across the Atlantic came, in the

spring of the year, the tidings of the death of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Scarcely noticed among the telegrams that supplied us with news of the progress of the fiercest and most unjust civil war that was ever waged, the simple announcement had, nevertheless, a deeper, though inexpressibly mournful, interest to not a few in England, than all the turmoil of battle that was compressed into the electric summary.

On the 19th of May, at his house in Plymouth, New Hampshire, with all the lovely sights and sounds of that sweet spring-time which he so dearly loved, the spirit of America's greatest prose-writer faded almost imperceptibly into eternity. Little known to the great European public, and indeed more especially endeared to the scholar and the dreamer than to the general reader by his genial humour and refined taste, he had never striven to become popular, and therefore the announcement of his comparatively early death created but little excitement, save among the reverent circle of which we have before spoken. So retiring and modest, indeed, were his habits, that to many of his countrymen, in that land where the privacy of a public man is almost invariably sacrificed to the discourteous curiosity of his admirers, Hawthorne was known but by his books, and a very few of the most refined and most intellectual men of the day, such as Longfellow and Wendell Holmes, were admitted to the rare delight of his friendship; but to these few he was well known, and with their appreciation he was content.

Kindly and gentle as a little child was the nature of him who has left us. Somewhat too much absorbed in his own abundant, delicate fancyings, and seeking habitually, in commune with his own beautiful and finer nature, a refuge from the rough contact and jarring turmoil of the busy world, he yet did not neglect his more obvious duties. An ever kind and attentive relative and friend, his name will be held in reverence, no less for these humble qualities than for his undying productions. His countrymen have reason to be peculiarly proud of him, for in him America has produced the most exquisite prose-poet and the most originally fanciful romancist of the age.

In no country of the Old or New World can we instance any author whose name is worthy to be placed beside that of Hawthorne on that peculiar path which was first irradiated by the morning blush of his fancy. Many have attempted to follow him; but they are, in almost every case, nearly forgotten; whilst the exquisite dream-scenery, which Hawthorne reveals to us, illumined by his own subtle phantasy, tinged with his heart-searching pathos, or fitfully softened into cool shadow by the opal-hued mistveil of his half-mystic but all-refined humour, still stands in ever fresh beauty, to charm all true lovers of art. And we may safely prophesy that it will be many ages before its subtle influence will fail, alternately to gladden and sadden the hearts of future readers. But though specially marked out as a possession of the "Mayflower" land by the peculiar sombre visitings of Puritan sadness that every now and then obscure us with a deep shadow, and the glimmering sun-motes of his dreamy fancy, he is even more generally loved and appreciated in England than in his native country. This may, we think, be partially attributed to the under-current of pathetic melancholy that runs through his gayest and most sparkling effusions, and the ever-present, subdued tone of longing aspiration

that seems to mark his beautiful nature, as inwardly mourning over and shrinking from the hard, stern realities of an essentially selfish and unchivalrous age. It is like the stream of dusky water, unreached by the rays of the sun, which is sometimes to be seen, in spring, flowing along the bed of a brook, whose upper surface radiates a thousand iridescent colours, in joyous answer to the kisses of the sun, whose ripples sparkle along in careless merriment, when a sudden change comes over it; a sombre flush seems, by some appreciable magic, to sweep over the prismatic play of the current; the under-stream for the nonce gets the upper hand: though the happy glitter is still visible, it is clouded by some half-sombre, half-translucent change, which sends a not ungrateful thrill of indefinable sadness to the heart. Though this may rob a mind, acutely alive to natural influences, of some of the buoyant rapture consequent on the delicious advent of spring, yet it has an effect on a sensitive intellect, that more than repays the momentary glooming of the land

scape.

It is this, and a thousand other natural phenomena of the same kind, that suggest to the poetic temperament more sublime and delicate conceptions by far than the most smiling aspect of summer, or the most gorgeously tinted landscape of autumn.

We Englishmen, belonging to the most material period of the most material country in the world,* are, perhaps, in our heart of hearts, a more romantic people than any that inhabit the known globe. Not in our acts do we show it, for they are, almost invariably, whether in public or private life, dictated by the most rigid considerations of realistic expediency; but we still, even the most conventional of us, love to cherish, in some dark corner of our souls, an inward hankering, scarcely even self-confessed, toward the most Utopian and fanciful of ideals, and almost always, though openly disclaiming it, feel a secret, indefinable sympathy with the mind of such a man as Nathaniel Hawthorne. His child-like simplicity, his freshness of thought, untainted by worldliness, and his half-sad, halfhopeful longings, strike upon us as a muchneeded and delightful relief from the grim positivism of conventional life.

As on a sultry day we plunge into the cool greenness of a beautiful wood, whose masses of foliage absorb the sunlight, and, whilst neutralizing its glare, assume thereby a luminous beauty and a half-translucent depth of shadow that is infinitely more soothing and attractive than the brilliant splendour of the sun-gilded plain, Hawthorne's commingled fancy and pathos present to us an ever-welcome retreat where we may rub-off, for a little, the dust of

*Some may object to this that the Americans themselves best answer this description; but we think that any impartial person who has followed the shifting fortunes and consequences of the present Civil War can scarcely hold such an opinion.