e than
ordinary difficulty. In these libraries there was, we find, as in
the inscriptions of Egypt, a complete literature, of which only some
shattered fragments have come down to us. The little we are able to
examine has produced upon our modern investigators a complex impression,
in which astonishment rather than admiration contends with a sense
of tedious-ness. There may be recognized here and there, among the
wearisome successions of phrases, with their rugged proper names,
episodes which seem something like a Chaldaean "Genesis" or "Veda;" now
and then a bold flight of fancy, a sudden exaltation of thought, or a
felicitous expression, arrests the attention and holds it captive for
a time. In the narrative of the adventures of Grilgames, for instance,
there is a certain nobility of character, and the sequence of events, in
their natural and marvellous development, are handled with gravity and
freedom: if we sometimes encounter episodes which provoke a smile or
excite our repugnance, we must take into account the rudeness of the age
with which they deal, and remember that the men and gods of the later
Homeric epic are not a whit behind the heroes of Babylonian story in
coarseness. The recognition of divine omnipotence, and the keenly felt
afflictions of the soul, awakened in the Chaldaean psalmist feelings of
adoration and penitence which still find, in spite of the differences of
religion, an echo in our own hearts; and the unknown scribe, who related
the story of the descent of Ishtar to the infernal regions, was able to
express with a certain gloomy energy the miseries of the "Land without
return. "These instances are to be regarded, however, as exceptional:
the bulk of Chaldaean literature seems nothing more than a heap of
pretentious trash, in which even the best-equipped reader can see no
meaning, or, if he can, it is of such a character as to seem unworthy
of record. His judgment is natural in the circumstances, for the ancient
East is not, like Greece and Italy, the dead of yesterday whose soul
still hovers around us, and whose legacies constitute more than the half
of our patrimony: on the contrary, it was buried soul and body, gods
and cities, men and circumstances, ages ago, and even its heirs, in the
lapse of years, have become extinct. In proportion as we are able to
bring its civilization to light, we become more and more conscious that
we have little or nothing in common with it. Its laws and customs, it