Rare is the worthiness of authorship: I justify mine office; Albeit fancies weak as mine credit not the calling. For it addeth immortality to dying facts, that are ready to vanish away, Embalming as in amber the poor insects of an hour; Shedding upon stocks and stones the tender light of interest, And illumining dark places of the earth, with radiance of classic lustre. It hath power to make past things present, and availeth for the present in the future, Delivering thoughts, and words, and deeds, from the outer darkness of oblivion. Where are the sages and the heroes, giants of old time?-- Where are the mighty kings, that reigned before Agamemnon?-- Alas they lie unwept, unhonoured, hidden in the midnight: Alas, for they died unchronicled: their memorial perished with them. Where are the nobles of Nineveh, and mitred rulers of Babylon? Where are the lords of Edom, and the royal pontiffs of Thebais? The golden Satrap, and the Tetrarch,--the Hun, and the Druid, and the Celt? The merchant princes of Phœnicia, and the minds that fashioned Elephanta? Alas, for the poet hath forgotten them; and lo! they are outcasts of Memory; Alas, that they are withered leaves, sapless and fallen from the chaplet of fame. Speak, Etruria, whose bones be these, entombed with costly care,-- Tell out, Herculaneum, the titles that have sounded in those thy palaces,-- Lycian Xanthus, thy citadels are mute, and the honour of their architects hath died; Copan and Palenque, dreamy ruins in the West, the forest hath swallowed up your sculptures; Syracuse,--how silent of the past!--Carthage, thou art blotted from remembrance! Egypt, wondrous shores, ye are buried in the sand-hills of forgetfulness! Alas,--for in your glorious youth Time himself was young, And none durst wrestle with that Angel, iron-sinewed bridegroom of Space; So he flew by, strong upon the wing, nor dropped one failing feather, Wherewith some hoary scribe might register your honour and renown. Beyond the broad Atlantic, in the regions of the setting sun, Ask of the plume-crowned Incas, that ruled in old Peru,-- Ask of grand Caziques, and priests of the pyramids in Mexico,-- Ask of a thousand painted tribes, high nobility of Nature, Who, once, could roam their own Elysian plains, free, generous, and happy, Who, now, degraded and in exile, having sold their fatherland for nought, Sink and are extinguished in the western seas, even as the sun they follow,-- Where is the record of their deeds, their prowess worthy of Achilles, Nestor's wisdom, the chivalry of Manlius, the native eloquence of Cicero, The skill of Xenophon, the spirit of Alcibiades, the firmness of a Maccabæan mother, Brotherly love that Antigone might envy, the honour and the fortitude of Regulus? Alas, their glory and their praise have vanished like a summer cloud; Alas! that they are dead indeed; they are not written down in the Book of