to the solemn
flow of the great Nile; the Ibis fluttered with continual motion; their
own bodies were full of ever-changing curves; and their whole visible
existence was unsteady, like the waves of the sea. But when the
temporary Life was changed, and "this mortal put on immortality," their
eyes and souls were filled with the utter stillness and repose of its
external aspects; its features became rigid and fixed, and were settled
to an everlasting and immutable calm; the vibrating grace of its lines
departed, and their ever-varying complexity became simplified, and
assumed the straightness and stiffness of Death. So the straight line,
the natural expression of eternal repose, in contradistinction to the
wavy line, which represents the animal movements of Life, became the
motive and spirit of their Art. The anomaly of Death in Life was present
in every development of the creative faculty, and no architectural
feature could be so slight and unimportant as not to be thoroughly
permeated with this sentiment. The tender and graceful lines of the
Lotus became sublime and monumental under the religious loyalty of
Egyptian chisels; and these lines, whether grouped or single, in the
severity of their fateful repose, in their stateliness and immobility,
wherever found, are awful with the presence of a grand serious humanity
long passed away from any other contact with living creatures. The
rendering of the human form, under this impulse of Art, produced results
in which the idea of mutability was so overwhelmed in this grandeur of
immortality, that we cry

"O melancholy eyes!
O vacant eyes! from which the soul has gone
To gaze in other lands,"

bend not upon us, living and loving mortals, that stony stare of
death,--lest we too, as smit with the basilisk, be turned into
monumental stone, and all the dear grace and movement of life be lost
forever!

"Solid-set,
And moulded in colossal calm,"

all the lines of this lost Art thus recall the sentiment of endless
repose, and even the necessary curves of its mouldings are dead with
straightness. The Love which produced these lines was not the passionate
Love which we understand and feel; they were not the result of a
sensuous impulse; but the Egyptian artist seemed ever to be standing
alone in the midst of a trackless and limitless desert,--around him
earth and sky meeting with no kiss of affection, no palpitating embrace
of mutual