Excerpt from Burlesques: Novels by Eminent Hands; Jeames"s Diary; The History of the Next French Revolution; A Legend of the Rhine; Adventures of Major Gahagan
Chronos shall die too; but Love is imperishable. Brightest of the Divinities, where hast thou not been sung? Other worships pass away; the idols for whom pyramids were raised lie in the desert crumbling and almost nameless; the Olympians are fled, their fanes no longer rise among the quivering olive-groves of Ilissus, or crown the emerald-islets of the amethyst ?gean! These are gone, but thou remainest. There is still a garland for thy temple, a heifer for thy stone. A heifer? Ah, many a darker sacrifice. Other blood is shed at thy altars, Remorseless One, and the Poet Priest who ministers at thy Shrine draws his auguries from the bleeding hearts of men!
While Love hath no end, Can the Bard ever cease singing? In Kingly and Heroic ages, "twas of Kings and Heroes that the Poet spake. But in these, our times, the Artisan hath his voice as well as the Monarch. The people To-Day is King, and we chronicle his woes, as They of old did the sacrifice of the princely Iphigenia, or the fate of the crowned Agamemnon.
Is Odysseus less august in his rags than in his purple? Fate, Passion, Mystery, the Victim, the Avenger, the Hate that harms, the Furies that tear, the Love that bleeds, are not these with us Still? are not these still the weapons of the Artist the colours of his palette? the chords of his lyre? Listen! I tell thee a tale - not of Kings - but of Men - not of Thrones, but of Love, and Grief, and Crime. Listen, and but once more. "Tis for the last time (probably) these fingers shall sweep the strings.
Noonday in Chepe.
"Twas noonday in Chepe. High Tide in the mighty River City! - its banks well nigh overflowing with the myriad-waved Stream of Man! The toppling wains, bearing the produce of a thousand marts; the gilded equipage of the Millionary; the humbler, but yet larger vehicle from the green metropolitan suburbs (the Hanging Gardens of our Babylon), in which every traveller might, for a modest remuneration, take a republican seat; the mercenary caroche, with its private freight; the brisk curricle of the letter-carrier, robed in royal scarlet: these and a thousand others were labouring and pressing onward, and locked and bound and hustling together in the narrow channel of Chepe. The imprecations of the charioteers were terrible. From the noble"s broidered hammer-cloth, or the driving-seat of the common coach, each driver assailed the other with floods of ribald satire.
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