Did the Sphinx follow with her cruel eye this fatal tissue of calamity to its shadowy crisis at Colonus? As the billows closed over her head, did she perhaps attempt to sting with her dying words? Did she say, "I, the daughter of mystery, am _called_; I am _wanted_. But, amidst the uproar of the sea, and the clangor of sea-birds, high over all I hear another though a distant summons. I can hear that thou, Œdipus, the son of mystery, art _called_ from afar: thou also wilt be _wanted_." Did the wicked Sphinx labor in vain, amidst her parting convulsions, to breathe this freezing whisper into the heart of him that had overthrown her? Who can say? Both of these enemies were pariah mysteries, and may have faced each other again with blazing malice in some pariah world. But all things in this dreadful story ought to be harmonized. Already in itself it is an ennobling and an idealizing of the riddle, that it is made a double riddle; that it contains an exoteric sense obvious to all the world, but also an esoteric sense--now suggested conjecturally after thousands of years--_possibly_ unknown to the Sphinx, and _certainly_ unknown to Œdipus; that this second riddle is hid within the first; that the one riddle is the secret commentary upon the other; and that the earliest is the hieroglyphic of the last. Thus far as regards the riddle itself; and, as regards Œdipus in particular, it exalts the mystery around him, that in reading this riddle, and in tracing the vicissitudes from infancy to old age, attached to the general destiny of his race, unconsciously he was tracing the dreadful vicissitudes attached specially and separately to his own. THE TEMPLARS' DIALOGUES. DIALOGUES. ORIGINAL ADVERTISEMENT, IN APRIL, 1824.