mother,--when I shall have returned to her?--Every day
I come back laden with spoil,--but to-day I have not been able to set
my trap,--for thy love makes me its prisoner!" "The goose flies away,
alights,--it has greeted the barns with its cry;--the flock of birds
increases on the river, but I leave them alone and think only of thy
love,--for my heart is bound to thy heart--and I cannot tear myself
away from thy beauty." Her mother probably gave her a scolding, but she
hardly minds it, and in the retirement of her chamber never wearies
of thinking of her brother, and of passionately crying for him: "O my
beautiful friend! I yearn to be with thee as thy wife--and that thou
shouldest go whither thou wishest with thine arm upon my arm,--for then
I will repeat to my heart, which is in thy breast, my supplications.--If
my great brother does not come to-night,--I am as those who lie in the
tomb--for thou, art thou not health and life,--he who transfers the joys
of thy health to my heart which seeks thee?" The hours pass away and
he does not come, and already "the voice of the turtle-dove speaks,--it
says: 'Behold, the dawn is here, alas! what is to become of me?' Thou,
thou art the bird, thou callest me,--and I find my brother in his
chamber,--and my heart is rejoiced to see him!--I will never go away
again, my hand will remain in thy hand,--and when I wander forth, I will
go with thee into the most beautiful places,--happy in that he makes me
the foremost of women--and that he does not break my heart." We should
like to quote the whole of it, but the text is mutilated, and we are
unable to fill in the blanks. It is, nevertheless, one of those products
of the Egyptian mind which it would have been easy for us to appreciate
from beginning to end, without effort and almost without explanation.
The passion in it finds expression in such sincere and simple language
as to render rhetorical ornament needless, and one can trace in it,
therefore, nothing of the artificial colouring which would limit it to
a particular place or time. It translates a universal sentiment into the
common language of humanity, and the hieroglyphic groups need only to be
put into the corresponding words of any modern tongue to bring home
to the reader their full force and intensity. We might compare it with
those popular songs which are now being collected in our provinces
before the peasantry have forgotten them altogether: the artlessness of
some of the ex