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'Tis autumn, again to Pocantico's stream
I wander once more for reverie and dream.
The bridge is my favorite seat, as of yore,

So I'll sit down again where I've oft sat before;
But changed is the scene, 't is more gorgeous now-
October has tinted each green maple bough,
And painted with yellow my buttonwood-tree,
Which, in summer, had made me a cool canopy;
And yet, from this balmy, sweet-scented air,
One is cheated to think, summer lingering near.

This bridge has a legend we all love to read,
Of the wild headless horseman and his terrible steed;
And we rarely do cross it, but swift comes to mind
Poor Ichabod Crane and his fears undefined.
Not far from this bridge lies that valley so sweet,
"Tween the hills of Westchester, with its cottages neat
In its bosom, still found standing hard by the road,
Is the little gray school-house, to travellers still showed,
Where our hero of letters, undisputed, held sway
Till he went to Katrina's on that fatal day.
When Love, the arch-robber, entered his breast,
And jealousy bitter gave his heart to unrest;
But fear gained the victory, all passions above,
In this victim so piteous, of unreturned love.
'Tis said that Pocantico's waters moved o'er,
The 'glory departed' was heard of no more!

There's a hush over all things-how tranquil this hour,
And Nature is lonely, though shorn of her power,
To waft us the perfume of roses in June,

Or fragrance from lilies that perish so soon.
'Tis the first day of winter; o'er blue sunny skies
A few fleeting fleecy clouds silently rise;
Dame Nature has scattered her garniture round,
To carpet the earth till you scarce hear a sound.

Again on the bridge, but as watcher, I stand,
For a scene of deep sorrow was now close at hand;
And softly they came, at the toll of the bell,

To lay one to rest, whom we all loved so well.
Not with sound of the cannon, to make one to start,
Did we bury our Irving, but with sorrowing heart;
To the earth we consigned him, the treasure to keep,
Beside loving kindred to 'sleep his last sleep.'
In a plain grave they laid him, beneath the green sod
Where the sleeper reposes, till the trumpet of God
Shall break the deep slumber of those that we love,
For a glorious reunion in the mansions above.

The companions of youth and companions of age,
The learned and good, the poet and sage,

Passed with grief-bowed head round the cold, open earth,
And unrestrained sorrow paid its tribute to worth.

When I saw the great concourse that followed the dead,
How precious their offerings, I mentally said,

Who, in silence and sorrow, this evidence gave

Of one long esteemed, yet in memory to live.

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The storms of the winter, its rude borean blasts
Alike o'er the high-born and lowly grave passed;
The traces of spring in the wood-paths were seen,
And mosses and lichens had put on their green.
When Pocantico's fetters were broken in twain,
I fled from the city to be rural again;

Old haunts have a charm, and thither sped I

To list to the stream as it went gushing by,

O'er the bridge, up the hill, 'cross the stile, through the ground, Till, by searching, the plot of the Irvings I found,

And there, such a scene for an artist of skill,

A study so lovely!-portray it I will.

Four beautiful girls, on this glorious morn,

Sat weaving green chaplets, a grave to adorn,

'T was Irving's, so worshipped, they could not forbear
To leave on that hillock a wreath and a tear.

That plain little marble o'er that worthy head placed,
With offerings of flowers has ofttimes been graced :
The sweet flowers fade, their bright hues depart,
But, fadeless, his name is engraved on our heart.

Old bridge and old church and old burial-ground,
Ye, too, shall decay, and no trace shall be found;
But as long as a stone or a timber remain,

And years shall be mine, I will visit again:

When the robin's glad notes through the greenwood shall ring,

And around us are heard the sweet voices of spring,'

I will hasten my steps to the buttonwood-tree,

To dream while they chant their sweet minstrelsy.

But list, I have heard that over the stream

A bridge of white marble is shortly to gleam,
Each abutment to be, as a cenotaph raised,
For one who, while living, refused to be praised,
Whose genius and modesty, equally great,
Desired not in death to be garnered in state.

Yet we cannot let perish or e'er be forgot

The virtues of one who gave fame to this spot.

Then let each place a stone in a bridge high and wide,
In memory of him who graced Sunnyside.

AN EXPLORATION OF THE PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT.

To become a traveller was the ruling passion of my boyhood. Books of travels were my only reading, and a story of times and men far remote even then possessed an interest beyond the fascination of romance.

As years passed on, circumstances permitted me the indulgence of my passion. A competence had been left me; there lacked ties to enchain me to a single spot; there was no place which, above another, was home. There clung around me none of those gentle associations which bind the majority of mankind to the place of their nativity.

The field of Egyptian research had just been invaded. The most renowned scholars of Europe were laboring in it, with a zeal stimulated almost to excitement by the astonishing discoveries on the threshold.

Hoary Time seemed about to give up all his secrets. Egypt's old tombs were yielding their story; their cryptograph ic inscriptions were being rapidly deciphered. The Sphynx, that dumb riddle of the centuries, seemed now ready to open its stony lips.

It is a land of mystery. The pilgrim treads upon the dust of countless generations. The rocks are graven with characters, the work of hands returned to dust, ages before Jacob sent his sons thither to buy corn. There, indeed, a thousand years are but as a day, and a generation is a thing that passeth away, even as a man putteth off a garment.

The traces of a civilization, of an art, a grandeur, of a pride and splendor, which dwarf the achievements of the infant world, impress the shores of the Nile. The ruins of Thebes, the columns of Karnak, had held out, almost from the birth of time, their sculptured story. In these hieroglyphics was the record of a mighty people, but there had been none to read them. To none had the

Sphynx opened its lips, charged with the secrets of the far-off, shadowy past.

But now there was a dawn upon this Egyptian darkness. One by one, these cryptographs gave up to Champollion and his eager rivals their long-locked meanings. Each mighty column was but a volume in the regal library of kings, whose last descendant was far above Pharaoh on that misty river of Time.

I had followed these explorations with an interest which is ever the child of mystery. I yielded to the fascination, and resorted to Egypt. It is hard to express the emotion with which I first stepped upon that shore. I was, as it were, wafted back by enchantment, far, far into the night of the ages. The companions of my thoughts were those old, strange races of men. So long and vivid was the exercise of my imagination, that these beings of the mind took substantial forms; they were always with me; and the dust became animated with the great souls which once tenanted it; the desert was populous with myriads that once poured from Thebes' hundred gates. The effete barbarians who built their huts among the columns of Karnak, or at the feet of the Pyramids, were unnoticed and wholly unknown. All that had been discovered I mastered. The few short syllables which genius and toil had spelt out in this dead lore, I 'learned. I devoted my labor and means to the work, under the guidance of those high-priests of learning to whom Memnon had opened his stony lips, in half disclosure of the secrets of the vast Necropolis around his mighty throne. I pursued the explorations with a zeal averred at times to approach monomania.

In my searches, extending far and near, to the high and the low, I chanced several times to meet native Egyptians who professed to be members of an he

reditary priesthood, to be the depositaries by tradition of the ancient magic, and of that occult knowledge for which old Egypt was famous among the nations. More than one of these mystic seers hinted himself to be possessed, also by tradition from hoary ages, of strange and peculiar knowledge touching the great tombs, and especially the Pyramids.

All of these professed revealers I employed, and eagerly questioned. They all held strange secrets, but all were impostors, save a single one. It is true that they did reveal the places of several tombs, unknown since the drifting sands had buried them, centuries ago; but they had no peculiar knowledge; they could afford no aid in my study of the cryptographs; they could reveal no secrets of the mighty dead.

But in Achmet, of Upper Egypt, I at last found one superior to his class, a man who indeed possessed a profound and an exclusive knowledge of the great tombs and monuments, and whom I really believe to have been the hereditary recipient of secrets handed down by tradition from the far-off ages and people, whose study fired my brain. He declared that these secrets had reached him through an interminable line of his mystic priesthood, from ages beyond any written history, coëval with the Pyramids themselves.

We explored many tombs and catacombs together. Even in those long known and explored, he astounded me by the disclosure of secret apartments and passages which had escaped discovery. Though the secret of the cryptographic character was lost, he said, and he had made no greater progress than I in deciphering the hieroglyphs, yet he had received from tradition the meanings of many of the carved and painted inscriptions which we found in the tombs; and with these he acquainted me.

He averred that he knew the whereabouts of a certain stone tablet, which contained voluminous inscriptions of the same royal decree, in three species of

characters, and in two languages, one of which was the Greek; that each of the temples whose ruins we explored, and thousands of which no vestige remained, had once contained a copy of the tablet, but that priestly jealousy had destroyed all that had escaped the tooth of time, so that there remained but this one. I besought him for a disclosure of this stone. Written in Greek, as well as in cryptograph, it was a dictionary to the lore I was striving to decipher.

But he declared it to be distant, and that a solemn oath bound him to reveal it to no Frank. I could not prevail with him, and relinquished the attempt with feelings I cannot describe. Armed with this tablet, I conceived the possibility of immediate and vast advances in the work of unlocking and exploring this ancient lore.

It is enough to say, in passing, that not long afterwards I was gratified by the discovery of the 'Rosetta Stone,' which, doubtless, is a mutilated copy of the tablet whereof Achmet spoke.

On one occasion he guided me far up the Nile, where we made a midnight exploration of an unknown catacomb, in which were deposited the mummies of. many thousand crocodiles, worshipped and embalmed in those distant ages as sacred reptiles. It was a strange and thrilling adventure, accomplished not without serious danger.

But it is my purpose, at present, to relate the story of another strange exploration, in which Achmet was my guide. The Pyramids, from whose summits fifty centuries looked down upon the sluggish Nile, had awakened in me a singular interest. A strange attraction drew me often to the feet of these stupendous piles, whose Titanic masonry, measureless bulk and duration, dwarf the mightiest deeds essayed since their erection. I doubted the explanations given by the learned of their origin. The labor of one hundred thousand men for twenty years could hardly have been needed to fix a meridian. I was equally confident that the greatest of

them all, Cheops, had not been erected his own mystic line had always shrunk for the tomb of a single king.

Explorations had been made long before. An entrance to the greatest had rewarded the zeal of Belzoni. A narrow passage had led him deep into the rocky centre, where he, the first who had disturbed the silence of the ages which reigned there, had found himself before an empty sarcophagus. I had also explored this Pyramid, but the royal one who, it may be, had afar off in the night of time tenanted this deep chamber, had vanished ages before.

The firm conviction that took possession of me that this great explorer had paused upon the threshold of the mystery, that he had turned back from the very door, excited my imagination to a feverish intensity of action. I now devoted myself, my life, my studies, and my whole soul, to this greatest of the Pyramids. I spent my days alone, in scaling the faces of the work, climbing its steps, seemingly laid for those Titans who warred with Jove; I criticised each seam and fissure; I sounded and tried every stone with bar and hammer. By night I wandered around its base, my eyes and thoughts riveted on the mighty pile with a thrilling fascination. It was silent, grand, awful. The night-wind, drifting from the Lybian desert, moaned around its summit, as sadly and mournfully as if it were nature's requiem for the souls of the unnumbered dead whose dust drifted around its deep foundations. My servant Achmet, or companion-he partook more of the latter than the former character-finally joined me in my researches here.

At last, affected by my zeal, he declared that he was able to reveal a secret of the Great Pyramid likewise never yet disclosed to a Frank. He had received the knowledge with solemn adjurations to reveal it to none save those of his race and mystery.

He said that he could point out an apartment deep under the stony centre of the pile, which no Frankish explorer had even suspected, and which those of

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from entering. He had been led to its threshold once, long years ago, by his ancestor, who suffered him to look within, but not to enter. This ancestor declared to Achmet that the disclosure had been handed down to himself in precisely the same solemn manner, and with the like solemn adjuration, never to touch with foot or hand the stony floor inside the door.

I lent a greedy ear to Achmet's assertion, for, as I have related, I had long felt a conviction that former explorers had turned away from the Great Pyramid and its mystery, satisfied that the whole had been revealed in the single little apartment and the empty sarcophagus.

He yielded to my will, and consented, though reluctantly, to become my guide to the Mystery of the Great Cheops-so is it called.

I assented to his entreaty that our expedition should be by night, and that his disclosures should be inviolable secrets. I could with difficulty await the hour, and I paced the earthen floor of our temporary hovel, exalted by hope, but a prey to a strange agitation.

Thick darkness at last crept from the eastward, tardily following the departed sun across the trackless desert and the old Nile. Black clouds drooped from the sky until they seemed to rest upon the very apex of the Pyramid. The moon, a waning crescent, had closely followed the sun in its departure, and not a single star lent its ineffectual ray to cheer the gloomy scene.

Solemn and awful, charged with the secrets of fifty centuries, stood, in its eternal, imperishable majesty, the PYRAMID.

To my excited ear, the gentle nightwind, moaning in snatches across the black, melancholy waste, now sinking, now swelling in volume, brought, as I half fancied, an articulate, sorrowful warning against the meditated desecra tion.

Provided with torches, to be lighted

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