"He was known as Abdel-Hassan, famed for wealth and power and pride; But the proud have often fallen, and, as he, the great have died!" Then, upon the ground before them, prostrate Abdel-Hassan fell, With his aged hands extended, trembling, to the lonely well,-- And the sacred soil beneath him cast upon his hoary head,-- Named the servants and the camels,--summoned Haroun from the dead,-- Clutched the unconscious palms around him, as if they were living men,-- And before him, in their order, rose his buried train again. Moved by pity, spake the stranger, bending o'er him in his grief:-- "What affects the man of sorrow? Speak,--for speaking is relief." Then he answered, rising slowly to that aged stranger's knee,-- "Thou beholdest Abdel-Hassan! They were mine, and I am he!" Wondering, stood they all around him, and a reverent silence kept, While, amidst them, Abdel-Hassan lifted up his voice and wept. Joy and grief, and faith and triumph, mingled in his flowing tears; Refluent on his patient spirit rolled the tide of sixty years. As the past and present blended, lo! his larger vision saw, In his own life's compensation, Nature's universal law. "God is good, O reverend stranger! He hath taught me of His ways, By this great and crowning lesson, in the evening of my days. "Keep the treasure,--I have plenty,--and am richer that I see Life ascend, through change and evil, to that perfect life to be,-- "In each woe a blessing folded, from all loss a greater gain, Joy and hope from fear and sorrow, rest and peace from toil and pain. "God is great! His name is mighty! He is victor in the strife! For He bringeth Good from Evil, and from Death commandeth Life!" ABOUT SPIRES. When the children of Shem said one to another at Babel,--"Go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top shall reach unto heaven," they typified a remarkable trait of the human mind,--a desire for a tangible and material exponent of itself in its most heroic moods. In the earlier ages of the world, when humanity, as it were, was becoming conscious of itself and its godlike energies, it seems as if this desire could find no nobler expression than in towers. The same spirit of enterprise which in our own day stretches forth inquiring hands into unexplored realms of physical and intellectual being, and acknowledges in the spoils of such search its noblest and proudest attainments, in more primeval times appears to have been content with the actual and visible invasion of high building into that sky which to them was the great type of the unknown and mysterious.