Age after age rolled by; storm and tempest hurled their thunders at her
head; wave after wave of bright insidious sand curled about her feet and
heaped its sliding grains against her side; men came and went in fleeting
generations, and seasons fled like hours through the whirling wheel of
Time; but the Sphinx longed and suffered no more. Her hour had come and
gone; her dull instinct had burnt out, her comely outline began to
disintegrate, her face grew blank and stony, her features crumbled away,
altars and inscriptions defaced her breast and hieroglyphed her ponderous
sides, men worshipped and wondered there, and travellers from lands beyond
the sun pitched their tents before her face and defiled her feet with
barbaric orgies; but she knew it no more,--her children were gone out into
the world. And the world had need of them. Its rank and miasmatic
civilization,--its hotbeds of sin and misery,--its civil corruptions and
its social lies,--its reeling, rotten principalities,--its sickly
atmosphere of effeminate luxury, wherein neither justice nor judgment
lived, and the solitary virtues left mere effete shadows of philanthropy
and cowardly impulses called love and mercy,--needed a new race, stony and
strong, unshrinking in conquest and reformation, full of zeal, and
incapable of pity, to rend away the fogs that smothered truth and decency,
to disperse the low-lying clouds of weak passion and maudlin luxury, to
blow a reveille clear and keen as the trumpet of the northwest wind, when
it sweeps down from its mountain-tops in stern exultation, and shouts its
Puritanic battle-psalm across the reeking, steaming meadows of sultry
August, fever-smitten and pestilent.
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