hou beholdest Abdel-Hassan! They were mine, and I am he!"

Wondering, stood they all around him, and a reverent silence kept,
While, amidst them, Abdel-Hassan lifted up his voice and wept.

Joy and grief, and faith and triumph, mingled in his flowing tears;
Refluent on his patient spirit rolled the tide of sixty years.

As the past and present blended, lo! his larger vision saw,
In his own life's compensation, Nature's universal law.

"God is good, O reverend stranger! He hath taught me of His ways,
By this great and crowning lesson, in the evening of my days.

"Keep the treasure,--I have plenty,--and am richer that I see
Life ascend, through change and evil, to that perfect life to be,--

"In each woe a blessing folded, from all loss a greater gain,
Joy and hope from fear and sorrow, rest and peace from toil and pain.

"God is great! His name is mighty! He is victor in the strife!
For He bringeth Good from Evil, and from Death commandeth Life!"

ABOUT SPIRES.

When the children of Shem said one to another at Babel,--"Go to, let us
build us a city and a tower whose top shall reach unto heaven," they
typified a remarkable trait of the human mind,--a desire for a tangible
and material exponent of itself in its most heroic moods. In the earlier
ages of the world, when humanity, as it were, was becoming conscious of
itself and its godlike energies, it seems as if this desire could find
no nobler expression than in towers. The same spirit of enterprise which
in our own day stretches forth inquiring hands into unexplored realms of
physical and intellectual being, and acknowledges in the spoils of such
search its noblest and proudest attainments, in more primeval times
appears to have been content with the actual and visible invasion of
high building into that sky which to them was the great type of the
unknown and mysterious.

The birth of these structures was not of the practical necessities of
life, but of that fond desire of the soul which has ever haunted
mankind with intimations of immortality. Towers thus became the boldest
imaginable symbols of energy and power. And when, in the course of time,
they became exigencies of society, and familiarized by the idea of
usefulness, even then they could not but be recognized as expressions of
the more heroic elements of human nature.

Founded in superabundant massiveness, and built in prodigality of
strength, the tower seems to defy