gainst thee!" And, at no
distant date from this, comes the peril: but I cannot, of a certainty,
read the day and hour. Well! if my glass runs low, the sands shall
sparkle to the last. Yet, if I escape this peril--ay, if I
escape--bright and clear as the moonlight track along the waters glows
the rest of my existence. I see honors, happiness, success, shining
upon every billow of the dark gulf beneath which I must sink at last.
What, then, with such destinies beyond the peril, shall I succumb to the
peril? My soul whispers hope, it sweeps exultingly beyond the boding
hour, it revels in the future--its own courage is its fittest omen. If
I were to perish so suddenly and so soon, the shadow of death would
darken over me, and I should feel the icy presentiment of my doom. My
soul would express, in sadness and in gloom, its forecast of the dreary
Orcus. But it smiles--it assures me of deliverance.'

As he thus concluded his soliloquy, the Egyptian involuntarily rose. He
paced rapidly the narrow space of that star-roofed floor, and, pausing
at the parapet, looked again upon the grey and melancholy heavens. The
chills of the faint dawn came refreshingly upon his brow, and gradually
his mind resumed its natural and collected calm. He withdrew his gaze
from the stars, as, one after one, they receded into the depths of
heaven; and his eyes fell over the broad expanse below. Dim in the
silenced port of the city rose the masts of the galleys; along that mart
of luxury and of labor was stilled the mighty hum. No lights, save here
and there from before the columns of a temple, or in the porticoes of
the voiceless forum, broke the wan and fluctuating light of the
struggling morn. From the heart of the torpid city, so soon to vibrate
with a thousand passions, there came no sound: the streams of life
circulated not; they lay locked under the ice of sleep. From the huge
space of the amphitheatre, with its stony seats rising one above the
other--coiled and round as some slumbering monster--rose a thin and
ghastly mist, which gathered darker, and more dark, over the scattered
foliage that gloomed in its vicinity. The city seemed as, after the
awful change of seventeen ages, it seems now to the traveler,--a City of
the Dead.'

The ocean itself--that serene and tideless sea--lay scarce less hushed,
save that from its deep bosom came, softened by the distance, a faint
and regular murmur, like the breathing of its sleep; and cur