538

POPULAR SCRIPTURE ZOOLOGY.

Too exquisite to bear the weight of dew,

‘Which every morn lets fall in pearls upon them,
Till all their pomp sinks down in mouldering relics,
Yet in their ruin lovelier than their prime.
Dust in the balance, atoms in the gale,
Compared with these achievements in the deep,
Were all the monuments of olden time,

In days when there were giants on the earth.
Babel’s stupendous folly, though it aim’d

To scale heaven’s battlements, was but a toy,
The plaything of the world in infancy :-—

The ramparts, towers, and the gates of Babylon,
Built for eternity, though where they stood,
Ruin itself stands still for lack of work,

And desolation keeps unbroken Sabbath.

Great Babylon, in its fall moon of empire,

Even when its ‘head of gold’ was smitten off,
And from a monarch changed into a brute,
Great Babylon was like a wreath of sand

Left by one tide, and cancell’d by the next ;
Egypt's dread wonders, still defying time,
‘Where cities have been crumbled into sand,
Scatter’d by winds beyond the Libyan desert,
Or melted down into the mud of Nile

And cast into tillage o’er the corn-sown fields,
Where Memphis flourish’d and the Pharaohs reign’d.
Egypt’s grey piles of hieroglyphic grandeur,
That have survived the language which they speak—
Preserving its dead emblems to the eye,

Yet hiding from the mind what these reveal ;—
Her pyramids would be mere pinnacles,