than the gardener, who is putting in young saplings to-day, under which, in a century, his descendants shall play.

-Or Michael Angelo? But History shows no sadder man. Or Beethoven, or Mozart, or the last new Poet whom the papers praise?

Once more remember the city to which you are going. Was he who entered it amid hosannas and under waving palm boughs, successful? Who shall dare to say? This much, at least, is clear, that none of these achieved what would be called success, in any of the Babylons in which we live, not in London or Paris, nor in Vienna or New York.

Success is a delusion. It is an attainment-but who attains? It is the horizon always bounding our path, and therefore never gained. The Pope, triple-crowned, and borne, with Flabella, through St. Peter's, is not successful, for he might be canonized into a saint. Pygmalion, before his perfect statue, is not successful, for it might live. Raphael, finishing the Sistine Madonna, is not successful, for her beauty has revealed to him a fairer and an unattainable beauty. The Merchant is not successful, for there is no end to making money; nor the last new Poet-because, if he be a Poet, he knows that he cannot write the music of the spheres.

Life, say the wise and the elders, grows sadder and sadder, and age strips it of delusions as Autumn winds strip the trees. Sir Horace Walpole, the artificial man of an artificial age, who had been fortunate, as few men are, said in his decline-"Life is a comedy to those who

think, and a tragedy to those who feel;" and again, more bitterly, "Life is a farce, and its last scene should not be mournful." As if no man could live and occupy his just place in men's regards, Lord Bacon says"Death hath this also, that it openeth the gate to good Fame and extinguisheth Envy." And, although admitting that a man may obtain "worthy ends and expectations"—he adds with alluring music: "But, above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is Nunc dimittis."

From Solomon to the last book I read, the refrain is the same: "Vanity of vanities," says he, and my author echoes-"Like all lives this is a tragedy; high hopes, noble efforts; under thickening difficulties and impediments, ever new nobleness of valiant effort, and the result, Death, with conquests by no means corresponding."

The night-wind howls mockingly into the desert, "Success, success !"—and its echo in your heart is that sad story of Sir Joshua Reynolds. When an old man, he was standing one day before one of his early pictures, lost in pensive thought; "I was thinking," said he, "of the promise of this picture, which I can never fulfil !"

As you draw the tent curtain and shut out the stars, you will swear by them to honor no more than is honorable, the practical talent that rules the world; and for the motto of your dreams, you will choose the wise old Chinese proverb: "The World's nonsense is the sense of God."

XII.

A Cruce.

THE faithful Reader who has clung with me to MacWhirter up to this chapter, may, if he will, regard the eleventh whence he has just emerged as an evening vapor rolling over the desert, and settling for awhile upon our camp.

But as it disperses, and the day breaks, and we are about to mount again, I say to him that the record of a desert journey must needs be more of sensation than of sight. With ink and types, which allow no perspective, no light, and shade, and color, only the pictures can be painted to which such means are competent. Therefore, how can the traveller most vividly figure to the reader who is not a student of some especial point, the regions of which he tells ?

Statistics hardly suffice. The golden ball of St. Peter's is four hundred and ninety-four feet from the pavement. But that statement, even supported by the fact that the breadth of the façade is more than four hundred feet, does not leave St. Peter's a permanent figure in the mind. Nor does the ingenious combination with those truths of the consideration that the great nave is fretted with gold, and

that the four huge piers which support the dome are faced with marble, and that the baldacchino or canopy over the high altar is of bronze, stripped by a Pope from the Pantheon, impress the mind with what it wishes to know of St. Peter's.

But the impression of all this wonderful architectural combination, and the associations which wreathe it, in a judicious and sensitive mind, with invisible ornaments of an unknown grace, if accurately reproduced by the pen, shall build St. Peter's again, and found it deep in your mind forever.

Is it not strange, even allowing all that I have previously claimed for travellers who tell their travels, that their books are so cold and spectral?

Before and after I went to the East, I read the numberless volumes that record the many Eastern tours of learned and poetic men. But the most, either despairing of imparting the true oriental flavor to their works, thinking, perhaps, that Eastern enthusiasm must needs exhale in the record, as the Neapolitans declare that the Lachrymæ Christi can have the genuine flavor only in the very Vesuvian vineyard where it grows, or hugging some forlorn hope that the reader's imagination will warm the dry bones of detail into life-most of the travellers write their books as bailiffs take an inventory of attached furniture.-Item. One great pyramid, four hundred and ninety-eight foot high.-Item. One tomb in a rock, with two bushels of mummy dust.-Item. Two hundred and fifty miles over a desert.-Item. One grotto at Bethlehem, and contents,-to wit: ten golden lamps, twelve silver Witto, twenty yards of tapestry and a marble pavement.

And with this ghostly dance of Death shaken before our eyes, we are invited to contemplate the gorgeous pageant

of oriental life.

The reader, surely, will not suspect me of slighting the claims of exact knowledge. Scientific research embodies its results in concise and colorless pages. Its aim is to state a fact, not to impart an impression. The latter, however, is the object of a general book of travels, and the facts must yield only their juice and their aroma to the traveller, if he would share his pleasure with others. Guide-books are not absorbingly interesting, and give small idea of the countries they describe. Guide-books are indispensable to the traveller, but they are surely not the standard of his own account of the objects, of which they give him the locality.

Look at Lewis's Egyptian pictures, even at Horace Vernet's ideally conventional paintings of Eastern life, and revelling in the luxury of their color and form, consider what books men have written of these things. Reflect, that if Lewis and Vernet were using the means of Titian and Claude, the book-writers professed to use those of Shakspeare and Shelley. The Arabian Nights and Hafiz are more valuable for their practical communication of the spirit and splendor of oriental life, than all the books of eastern travel ever written, of which, for the general reader, Eothen is certainly the best, being brilliant, picturesque, humorous, and poetic. Yet Eothen is still a Cockney-never puts off the Englishman, and is suspicious of his own enthusiasm, which, therefore, sounds a little exaggerated.

D*