Greece quivers at the phantasm of their Turkish turbans and gleaming
sabres, their skill at massacre and their fiendish tortures; Italy, fair
and sad, "woman-country," droops shuddering at sight of their Austrian
uniforms; and the Brahmin sees them in scarlet, blood-dyed, hurling from
the cannon's mouth helpless captives,--killing, not converting.
Wherever, all the wide world over, a nation shrinks from its oppressors, or
a slave from his master,--wherever a child flees from the face of a parent
who knows neither justice nor mercy, or a wife goes mad under the secret
tyranny of her inevitable fate,--wherever pity and mercy and love veil
their faces and wring their hands outside the threshold,--there abide the
Sphinx's children.
For this she longed and hoped and waited in the Desert! for this she envied
the red fox and the ostrich! for this her dumb lips parted, in their
struggle after speech, to ask of earth and air some solace to her solitude!
for this, for these, she poured out her dim life in one strong, wilful
aspiration!
Happy Sphinx, to be left even of that dull existence! blessedly unconscious
of that granted desire! mouldering away in the curling sand-hills, the prey
of hostile elements, the mysterious symbol of a secret yearning and a vain
desire! Not for thee the bitterness of success! not for thee the conscious
agony of penitence,--the falling temple of the will crushing its idolater!
No wild voices in the wind reproach the wilder pulses of a slow-breaking
heart; no keen words of taunt sting thee into madness; Memory hurls at thee
no flying javelins; broken-winged Hope flutters about thee no more! Thy day
is over, thine hour is past!
_"Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead, more than the living
which are yet alive!"_
* * * * *
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
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