often sweetened and refined by sentiment,—a spiritual as well as a sensuous yearning,—purer, as ardent, more pervading than the love-passion of contemporaneous nations. And the same spirituality of nature which made the Hindoo thus, fitted him also for the subtlest and loftiest flights of speculation,—savouring little of the utilitarian, indeed, but tending to gratify the soul in many of its highest and purest aspirations. Caste, unknown in China, was in India all-prevalent; and there, also, we meet in its sternest form that spirit of devoted asceticism by which the mystics of the East, and subordinately even in the Christian Church, have striven to exalt themselves above the level of humanity by extinguishing all earthly passion, and so drawing into nearer communion with the Deity. Or pass to Egypt, and behold the now desolate valley-land of the Nile reinvested with its old splendour and fertility. Let a thousand irrigating canals spread again over the surface, re-clothing the land with verdure; while up from the sands spring miles of temples, pyramids, and endless avenues of sphinxes, obelisks, and gigantic statues. And Thebes with its “hundred gates,” its libraries, and stately palaces,—and Memphis with its immense population, whose bones are still seen whitening the desert sands whereon the city once bloomed amidst verdure,—reappear with crowds of artisans and professional men, carrying the division of labour almost as far as it is done in modern times; while all around a rural population is tending herds or tilling the thrice-fertile soil; and, wearily and worn, innumerable bands of captives—Nubians from the south, Negroes from the desert, Arabs from across the Red Sea, and Syrians and Assyrians from Euphrates to the foot of Mount Taurus—are toiling in digging canals, in making bricks, or in quarrying, transporting, or raising to their place, those huge blocks of granite which fill with astonishment the engineers even of our own times. Turn from all this pomp and bustle and busy hum of life, along that silent mile-long avenue of double sphinxes; and, passing beneath the stupendous ornamented portals of Karnac or Luxor, or some other temple of the land, enter the vast halls and countless apartments devoted to sacerdotal seclusion,—where the white-robed priests of the Nile, bathing three times a day to maintain mental purity and calm, engaged in the abstract sciences, or searched deep into the secrets of nature for that magical power by which they fascinated and subjugated the minds of the people, and which enabled them to contend on almost equal terms with the divinely-commissioned champion of the Hebrews.