THE BURDEN OF NINEVEH.

IN our Museum galleries

To-day I lingered o'er the prize

Dead Greece vouchsafes to living eyes,

Her Art for ever in fresh wise

From hour to hour rejoicing me.
Sighing I turned at last to win

Once more the London dirt and din ;
And as I made the swing-door spin
And issued, they were hoisting in
A winged beast from Nineveh.

A human face the creature wore,

And hoofs behind and hoofs before,

And flanks with dark runes fretted o'er.

'Twas bull, 'twas mitred Minotaur,

A dead disbowelled mystery :

The mummy of a buried faith

Stark from the charnel without scathe,
Its wings stood for the light to bathe,—
Such fossil cerements as might swathe
The very corpse of Nineveh.

The print of its first rush-wrapping,
Wound ere it dried, still ribbed the thing.

What song did the brown maidens sing,
From purple mouths alternating,

When that was woven languidly?

What vows, what rites, what prayers preferr'd, What songs has the strange image heard?

In what blind vigil stood interr'd

For ages, till an English word

Broke silence first at Nineveh ?

Oh when upon each sculptured court,
Where even the wind might not resort,—
O'er which Time passed, of like import
With the wild Arab boys at sport,-—

A living face looked in to see :-
O seemed it not-the spell once broke-
As though the carven warriors woke,

As though the shaft the string forsook,
The cymbals clashed, the chariots shook,

And there was life in Nineveh?

On London stones our sun anew

The beast's recovered shadow threw.

(No shade that plague of darkness knew, No light, no shade, while older grew

By ages the old earth and sea.)

Lo thou! could all thy priests have shown
Such proof to make thy godhead known?
From their dead Past thou liv'st alone e;

And still thy shadow is thine own,

Even as of yore in Nineveh.

That day whereof we keep record,
When near thy city-gates the Lord
Sheltered His Jonah with a gourd,
This sun, (I said) here present, pour'd

Even thus this shadow that I see.
This shadow has been shed the same
From sun and moon,-from lamps which came

For prayer, from fifteen days of flame,
The last, while smouldered to a name
Sardanapalus' Nineveh.

Within thy shadow, haply, once
Sennacherib has knelt, whose sons

Smote him between the altar-stones :
Or pale Semiramis her zones

Of gold, her incense brought to thee,

In love for grace, in war for aid:

Ay, and who else? . . . . till 'neath thy shade
Within his trenches newly made

Last year the Christian knelt and pray'd

Not to thy strength-in Nineveh.*

Now, thou poor god, within this hall

Where the blank windows blind the wall

From pedestal to pedestal,

The kind of light shall on thee fall

Which London takes the day to be:

While school-foundations in the act

Of holiday, three files compact,

Shall learn to view thee as a fact

Connected with that zealous tract:

'ROME,-Babylon and Nineveh.'

During the excavations, the Tiyari workmen held their services in the shadow of the great bulls.-(Layard's ' Nineveh,' ch. ix.)

Deemed they of this, those worshippers, When, in some mythic chain of verse Which man shall not again rehearse, The faces of thy ministers

Yearned pale with bitter ecstasy? Greece, Egypt, Rome,-did any god Before whose feet men knelt unshod Deem that in this unblest abode Another scarce more unknown god Should house with him, from Nineveh ?

Ah! in what quarries lay the stone
From which this pillared pile has grown,
Unto man's need how long unknown,
Since those thy temples, court and cone,
Rose far in desert history?

Ah! what is here that does not lie

All strange to thine awakened eye?

Ah! what is here can testify

(Save that dumb presence of the sky) Unto thy day and Nineveh ?

Why, of those mummies in the room
Above, there might indeed have come