of gilded bronze, its columns of electrum, and its mysterious altars raised to Art, Old Age, and Poverty. Unlike other Pagan shrines--for it contained no visible representation of a divinity--it was always approached by the Phœnician mariner with feelings of gratitude and awe. It was associated with his naval superiority over the other nations of antiquity. It was intimately connected with the increase of his wealth; with the continuance of his prosperity; with the discovery of lands unknown to his contemporaries and rivals; with the preservation of his stores of occult wisdom, whose sources he explored with such acuteness and concealed with such success. Every device of fable and superstition had been employed to clothe this locality with such a character as might effectually check the efforts of an inquiring or aggressive commercial spirit. To the accomplishment of this end, the phenomena of Nature lent their powerful aid. The contracted passage between two of the greatest bodies of water known to the ancients was of unfathomable depth. On both sides, despite the agitation of the waves, its level remained the same. Even during both the ebb and flow of the tide, the current always ran strongly towards the east. Its force was steady, constant, invariable; the waxing and waning of the moon, the most furious tempests, exerted no appreciable influence over the inflexible regularity of its motion. It was not without reason that the apparent suspension of the laws of equilibrium and of the forces of Nature was attributed by the superstitious to the divinity whose temple guarded the famous portals upon which he had imposed his name. It has been maintained by scholars that within this shrine was preserved, as a sacred relic, a fragment of magnetic ore, of great antiquity, known to the Tyrian navigator as a priceless talisman--the precursor of the mariner’s compass--which had guided his course to distant Britain, and assured to his countrymen the empire of the seas. According to popular belief, through this channel the way led to the realm of Chaos. To brave its unknown and dreaded perils was sacrilege, and to none, save those authorized by the priests of Melcareth, was this undertaking permitted. In subsequent times, invested with little less mystery, this region had bequeathed not a few of its reminiscences to the Roman, and awakened the curiosity of the Arab, as he fixed his gaze upon the white-topped waves sparkling in the sunlight between continent and continent and sea and sea, like the facets of a precious gem; or, in the beautiful imagery of the Oriental chronicler, “like a diamond between two emeralds and two sapphires, the master-stone in the ring of empire.”