pageantry of a gorgeous festival, with the viands untasted and the cup undrained before them, struck him with a comic wonder and pleasant sportiveness which he cared not to suppress. Approaching the venerable prime minister of the realm, who sat with the goblet near his lip, immovable as death, the thirsty soldier familiarly proposed to drink his health, and only made mouths at the cup when he found it “as dry as dust.” The cheek of the dancing girl, who stood pivoted for her century upon one toe, he found “as cold as a stone;” and the apples offered by an African slave to a guest, whose hand hung arrested midway in the reach, proved to his disappointed taste a petrified humbug. The whole scene of deprivation and incapacity before him he pronounced an epidemic sleeping fever, and he wondered if it was catching, and where and how he should get his dinner! All this has its parallel and exposition in the boys that mock a drunkard reeling through the street, and the contrasted sadness which a soul alive to the moral ruin feels at the same sight; or it may be witnessed again in the conduct of an insensible boor and that of a person of refinement in the presence of the insane; and in general, in the sentiments of those who have, and those who have not, learned that “the life is more than meat, and the body than raiment.” These reflections present themselves in the pause while the champion stands, riveted with emotions of wonder and pity at the mingled gloom and glory of the scene. But the action proceeds again. A strain of melody spontaneously waking from the silence of an age, fitly preludes and prophesies the harmonies of the new era, and there wants only the taliha-cumi of the Deliverer to awaken the princess and her household into the activities of full life. At the bidding of the minstrel he advances to her pavilion. Answering to his word and touch, she rises. One by one the women first resume their proper consciousness, and the revival of the men follows in proper order, till the spell is broken and the last shadow of the long night gives place to the perfect day. The renovated realm every where receives its primal beauty, the flowers of Eden bloom again, and the fruits regain their flavor, the wine is new in the new kingdom, and all the material ministries of life without, respond to the renewed faculties within.