=BY HENRY WILLIAM HERBERT, TRANSLATOR= =OF THE PROMETHEUS AND AGAMEMNON= =OF ÆSCHYLUS, ETC. ETC.= Mute be the skies and still, Silent each haunted hill And valley deep! Let earth, and ocean’s breast, And all the breezes rest— Let every echo sleep! Unshorn his ringlets bright, He comes—the lord of light— Lord of the lyre. Morn lifts her lids of snow, Tinged with a rosy glow, To greet thee, glorious sire. Climbing, with winged feet Of fiery coursers fleet, Heaven’s arch profound, Far through the realms of air, From out thy sunny hair, Thou flingest radiance round. Thine are the living streams Of bright immortal beams— The founts of day! Before thy path careers The chorus of the spheres With wild rejoicing lay. The sad and silver moon Before thy gorgeous noon Slow gliding by, Joys in her placid soul To see around her roll Those armies of the sky. * * * * * =ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.= =BY HENRY WILLIAM HERBERT, AUTHOR OF “THE BROTHERS,” “THE CAPTAINS OF THE OLD WORLD,” ETC.= Some thirty years before the Christian era, Egypt was not as now a barbarous and desert region, a strip of rudely cultivated land along the margin of the eternal Nile, and all beyond that semi-civilized district a waste of howling wilderness, shifting and fiery sands roamed by the wild hyena, or the wilder Arab, scattered here and there with those gigantic relics of a former race, which, while they recall the original magnificence of the kings, and priests yet mightier than kings, who ruled of yore with a sway revered and dreaded to the very limits of the earth in those huge halls, are now avoided, or visited in fear and trembling by the adventurous traveler, as haunts of the ferocious Bedouin. Her cities were not then the sinks of mingled filthiness and luxury; a foreign rule had not then paralyzed her commerce, desolated her fields, and brutified her men. The Moslem had not then poured upon her, the garden of the Mediterranean shore, a scourge more foul and loathsome than the most terrible of her ancient plagues.