Hanging Gardens of Babylon--world-wonder: Babylon as described by Herodotus--city of blood and beauty and winged power: city surfeited with the slaughter of Assyrian Nineveh: city of the great temple of Bel: city of palaces guarded by majestic colossi--Sphinxes, winged lions, man-head bulls; city of gold and precious stones and ivory edifices and streets of burnished brass: city of the fatal Euphrates, of Baltshazzar’s banquet and the dread hand-writing upon the wall: city of a destruction so tremendous, so terrible that the lamentation thereof, caught vibrantly in Biblical amber, rings on and ever on adown the ages, “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen!” “They say the Lion and the Lizard keep The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep: And Bahram, that great Hunter--the Wild Ass Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his sleep.” --_Omar Khayyam._ And the site of Babylon, that mighty Paris of the past, is not now authoritatively known. Does the river know; does it remember the glory and the horror-night and the gloom? Is the sad sighing of rivers caused by the sorrows they see as they flow? And is the eternal moan of ocean the aggregate of the throbs of woe that the rivers have felt as they flow? Does nature know of mortal woe, does she, indeed, lament with Moschus the death of pastoral Bion, with Shelley, the untimely departure of Keats, our “Adonais”? Fact or fancy, suggestive silence or assertive sound, poet-dream or cynic-certainty--which draws nearer to truth? which shall prevail? Granicus-Issus--bloody outlets of the wounds of the world when Macedonian Alexander made Europe and Asia bleed! Was Alexander the Great great? Moralize as we may; shudder at the grim bloody outlets of a wounded world; wonder at the mad folly of the masses who, at the caprice of a magnetic madman, wildly slay and submit to be slain; see clearly, in the cut and statuary past, the dolt unreason of it all, the uselessness, the Pelion-Ossa horror: yet honestly recognize that deep down in the perverse human heart there lurks loving admiration for--Alexander the Great. Rameses, Cyrus, Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Napoleon--we cannot dissociate these men from their deeds; how then can we disapprove their deeds and approve these men? Why is it that a Shelley, Byron, De Musset, Swinburne, Omar--_ad infinitum_--enthrall us by the charm of their written words, even tho’ we disagree with them in their tenets, their philosophy of life, their conclusions: and we censure and condemn their private lives! Can men, as Catullus sings to Lesbia, both “adore and scorn” the same object at the same time? There are many replies to these questions, but no satisfactory answer. Psychologists, take note.