The little hilt of horn and pearl,—even such Twist in their garters. Father, I have done : And from her side now she unwinds the thick 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. Once more the London dirt and din; A human face the creature wore, 'Twas bull, 'twas mitred Minotaur, A dead disbowelled mystery: The mummy of a buried faith Stark from the charnel without scathe, The print of its first rush-wrapping, What song did the brown maidens sing, 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, A living face looked in to see :- As though the shaft the string forsook, 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 And still thy shadow is thine own, That day whereof we keep record, When near thy city-gates the Lord 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, Sardanapalus' Nineveh. * Within thy shadow, haply, once Sennacherib has knelt, whose sons Smote him between the altar-stones : Of gold, her incense brought to thee, Ay, and who else? . . . . till 'neath thy shade 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.) |