For ever sleeping in my breast—a numbing WARDEN, KEEP A PLACE FOR ME. pain That would not for an instant be forgot. Oh, but I loved him so, that very feeling Became intolerable. And I believed This false Giuseppe, too, for all the sneers, The shrugs and glances, of my intimates. They slandered me and him, yet I believed. He was a noble, and his love to me Was a reproach, a shame, yet I believed. He wearied of me, tried to shake me off, Grew cold and formal, yet I would not doubt. Oh, lady, I was true! Nor till I saw Giuseppe walk through the cathedral door With Dora, the rich usurer's niece, upon The very arm to which I clung so oft, Did I so much as doubt him. Even then More is my shame-I made excuses for him: "Just this or that had forced him to the course: Perhaps he loved me yet—a little yet. His fortune or his family had driven My poor Giuseppe thus against his heart. The low are sorry judges for the great. Yes, yes, Giuseppe loved me!" But at last I did awake. It might have been with less: There was no need of crushing me, to break My silly dream up. In the street, it chanced, Dora and he went by me, and he laughed A bold, bad laugh-right in my poor pale face, INCIDENT OF PRISON LIFE IN THE KINGS COUNTY PENITENTIARY. DISCHARGED again! Yes, I am free, But, warden, keep a place for me; But when I went away I said, 'Twas easy said I meant it too. And starve at last? When willing hands life How did I know that he would be And many a time at dead of night Because it means there was a time Knew how to love and dared to pray. No, I'm not fit for liberty; Than yonder city's desperate strife; So, warden, keep a place for me. PELEG ARKWRIGHT. DESCRIPTION AND CONQUEST OF BABYLON. ABYLON, traversed in the middle by the Euphrates, was surrounded by walls three hundred feet in height, seventy-five feet in thickness, and composing a square of which each side was one hundred and twenty stadia, or nearly fifteen English miles, in length; around the outside of the walls was a broad and deep moat from whence the material for the bricks composing them had been excavated, while one hundred brazen gates served for ingress and egress. Besides, there was an interior wall less thick, but still very strong, and as a still farther obstruction to invaders from the north and north-east another high and thick wall was built at some miles from the city, across much of the space between the Euphrates and the Tigris-called the "wall of Media"-seemingly a little to the north of that point where the two rivers most nearly approach to each other, and joining the Tigris on its west bank. Of the houses many were three or four stories high, and the broad and straight streets, unknown in a Greek town until the distribution of the peiræeus by Hippodamus, near the time of the Peloponnesian war, were well calculated to heighten the astonishment raised by the whole spectacle in a visitor like Herodotus. The royal palace, with its memorable terraces or hanging-gardens, formed the central and commanding edifice in one half of the city, the temple of Belus in the other half. That celebrated temple, standing upon a basis of one square stadium and enclosed in a precinct two square stadia in dimensions, was composed of eight solid towers, built one above the other, and is alleged by Strabo to have been as much as a stadium or furlong high (the height is not specified by Herodotus); it was full of costly decorations and possessed an extensive landed property. Along the banks of the river, in its passage through the city, were built spacious quays, and a bridge on stone piles, for the placing of which, as Herodotus was told, Semiramis had caused the river Euphrates to be drained off into the large side reservoir and lake constructed higher up its Besides this great town of Babylon itself, there were throughout the neighborhood, between the canals which united the Euphrates and the Tigris, many rich and populous villages, while Borsippa and other considerable towns were situated lower down on the Euphrates itself. And the industry, agricultural as well as manufacturing, of the collective population was not less persevering than productive; their linen, cotton and woollen fabrics and their richly ornamented carpets were celebrated throughout all the Eastern regions. Their cotton was brought in part from islands in the Persian Gulf, while the flocks of sheep tended by the Arabian nomads supplied them with wool finer even than that of Miletus or Tarentum. Besides the Chaldæan order of priests, there seem to have been among them certain other tribes with peculiar hereditary customs; thus there were three tribes, probably near the mouth of the river, who restricted themselves to the eating of fish alone, but have no evidences of a military caste like that in Egypt, nor any other hereditary profession. In order to present any conception of what Assyria was in the early days of Grecian history and during the two centuries preceding the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus, in 536 B. C., we unfortunately have no witness earlier than Herodotus, who did not see Babylon until near a century after that event; about seventy years after its still more disastrous revolt and second subjugation by Darius, Babylonia had become one of the twenty satrapies of the Persian empire, and, besides paying a larger regular tribute than any of the other nineteen, supplied from its exuberant soil provision for the great king and his countless host of attendants during one third part of the year. Yet it was then in a state of comparative degradation, having had its immense walls breached by Darius, and having afterward undergone the ill-usage of Xerxes, who, since he stripped its temples, and especially the venerated temple of Belus, of some of their richest ornaments, would probably be still more reckless in his mode of dealing with the civil edifices. If, in spite of such inflictions, and in spite of that manifest evidence of poverty and suffering in the people which Herodotus expressly notices, it continued to be what he describes, still counted as almost the chief city of the Persian empire, both in the time of the younger Cyrus and in that of Alexander, we may judge what it must once have been, without either foreign satrap or foreign tribute, under its Assyrian kings and Chaldæan priests, during the last of the two centuries which intervened between the era of Nabonassar and the capture of the city by Cyrus the Great. Though several of the kings during the first of these two centuries had contributed much to the great works of Babylon, yet it was during the second century of the two, after the capture of Nineveh by the Medes, and under Nebuchadnezzar and Nitokris, that the kings attained the maximum of their power and the city its greatest enlargement. It was Nebuchadnezzar who constructed the seaport Teredon at the mouth of the Euphrates, and who probably excavated the long ship-canal of near four hundred miles which joined it, which was perhaps formed partly from a natural western branch of the Euphrates. The brother of the poet Alkæus-Antimenidas, who served in the Babylonian army and distinguished himself by his personal valor (600-580 B. c.)—would have seen it in its full glory; he is the earliest Greek of whom we hear individually in connection with the Babylonians. It marks strikingly the contrast between the Persian kings and the Babylonian kings on whose ruin they rose that, while the latter incurred immense expense to facilitate the communication between Babylon and the sea, the former artificially impeded the lower course of the Tigris in order that their residence at Susa might be out of the reach of assailants. That which strikes us most, and which must have struck the first Grecian visitors much more, both in Assyria and Egypt, is the unbounded command of naked human strength possessed by these early kings, and the effect of mere mass and indefatigable perseverance, unaided either by theory or by artifice, in the accomplishment of gigantic results. In Assyria the results were in great part exaggerations of enterprises in themselves useful to the people for irrigation and defence; religious worship was worship was ministered to in the like manner, as well as the personal fancies and pomp of their kings, while in Egypt the latter class predominates more over the former. We scarcely trace in either of them the higher sentiment of art which owes its first marked development to Grecian susceptibility and genius. But the human mind is in every stage of its progress, and most of all in its rude and unreflecting period, strongly impressed by visible and tangible magnitude and awe-struck by the evidences of great power. To this feeling for what exceeded the demands of practical convenience and security the wonders both in Egypt and Assyria chiefly appealed, while the execution of such colossal works demonstrates habits of regular industry, a concentrated population under one government, and, above all, an implicit submission to the regal and priestly sway, contrasting forcibly with the small autonomous communities of Greece and Western Europe, wherein the will of the individual citizen was so much more energetic and uncontrolled. The acquisition of habits of regular industry, so foreign to the natural temper of man, was brought about in Egypt and Assyria, in China and Hindostan, before it had acquired any footing in Europe; but it was purchased either by prostrate obedience to a despotic rule or by imprisonment within the chain of a consecrated institution of caste. Even during the Homeric period of Greece these countries had attained a certain civilization in mass without the ac, quisition of any high mental qualities or the development of any individual genius; the religious and political sanction, sometimes combined and sometimes separate, determined for every one his mode of life, his creed, his duties and his place in society, without leaving any scope for the will or reason of the agent himself. Now, the Phenicians and Carthaginians manifest a degree of individual impulse and energy which puts them greatly above this type of civilization, though in their tastes, social feelings and religion they are still Asiatic. And even the Babylonian community, though their Chaldæan priests are the parallel of the Egyptian priests with a less measure of ascendency, combine with their industrial aptitude and constancy of purpose something of that strenuous ferocity of character which marks so many people of the Semitic race, Jews, Phenicians and Carthaginians. These Semitic people stand distinguished as well from the Egyptian life—enslaved by childish caprices and antipathies and by endless frivolities of ceremonial detail-as from the flexible, many-sided and self-organizing Greek, not only capable of opening both for himself and for the human race the highest walks of intellect and the full creative agency of art, but also gentler by far in his private sympathies and dealings than his contemporaries on the Euphrates, the Jordan or the Nile; for we are not, of course, to compare him with the exigences of Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both in Babylonia and in Egypt the vast |