foundations of its mosques; the Memphis of yesterday, as it is builded in their shadow; and a long succession of cities cherishing the arts, and glorying in the patience which had lifted its stones when as yet not a chisel had vexed the mountains of other lands.

"We are rapidly rebuilding Memphis when the Arabs interrupt us with impatient clamors. One long look, and we are ready to descend. But it is often more difficult to get down than to climb up. Pius IX. finds it so, and why should not we? Horace evidently forgot St. Peter's and the Pyramids, when he said, 'the way down is easy.' What hanging in mid-air from the arms of strangers! What trembling knees, and weary hands, and tired limbs indignant at each shock! What timid glances downward, and gentle force urging on, before a remonstrance can be uttered, to accomplish the movement! To be sure, the Arabs declare that we are the strongest, handsomest, richest, and most generous possessors of 'bucksheesh' that ever came down a Pyramid; but they reject a blessing which has no gleam of silver to prove it, and leave us at length, tired and alone, leaning upon the stones, and dreaming, like Jacob, of stairways to heaven, upon which, not angels, but our own weary selves are continually ascending and descending."-pp. 62-64.

Nile-boating is the very dolce far niente of dreamy, poetic, elysian locomotion. From the lumbering Italian diligence, or the rushing, dusty flight of a railway carriage, to the slowly drifting, gently wafted floating of the Nile boat, with the drowsy natives dozing, sleeping, singing, praying as the mood takes them, while the ripple of the stream plays with your keel a lulling dalliance, and here and there a low village along the banks tells you that you are not navigating a river beyond the confines of an inhabited globe — the contrast is complete! It is worth a Mediterranean voyage to a New Englander to experience so thoroughly new a sensation.

You drive the boat peg into the soft bank, and ramble out along the fields and through the hamlets, admiring the brilliantly dyed birds, the ghostly camels of the early twilight, the domestic fowls, the uncouth natives, and all the strange, weird oddities of so primitive a state of existence. The breeze freshens, and again casting off, you sweep out into the turbid stream musing about the days before the flood or any thing which is farthest removed from the wear and tear of our modern friction. There is none of this here. The years of Methusaleh have come back again. There is time enough to live without hurry

ing forevermore. The nervousness is all gone from your bones. A day is nearer like a thousand years than you ever thought of so utterly realizing. An old crocodile rounds up his back as if to destroy in you the last traces of a sense of personal identity. Your Occidental home and antecedents become to you a dancing, nebulous phantasmagoria. Father Nile has metamorphosed you into another son of the desert, whose yellow sands shimmer under the sunlight like a becalmed ocean of molten metal.

"The evenings on the Nile are the dream of a lifetime. Then the bold hunter Orion comes slowly up from the Arabian desert, and the constellation of Canopus rises over the southern hills, shining through the dry air, clear and beautiful as the lamps in the temples of olden time. The tall Shadoofs seem stalking through the dull haze along the horizon. Every hillside, with that sympathy peculiar to the limestone ranges of Egypt, changes from the ruddy sunset to the silver hue of night. You almost hear the faint, far-off music of the palaces, and leave behind you, like the foam of the river, the two thousand years of Egypt's misery. She is only asleep. Silver pathways rise in the moonlight for the white feet of the Naiads, and wait gleaming and quivering for their coming. The morrow will unfold the blossoms of the Padma, the wild lotus,

'which whoso tastes

Insatiate riots in the sweet repast!

Nor other home, nor other care intends,

But quits his home, his country, and his friends.'

"How majestic is the Nile! Like the streams of Eden, it seems created, not gathered. Calm and changeless, yet ever beautiful as the shadow of its own hills, it reflects the deep blue of a cloudless sky and the firmness of a constant sun.

'It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,

Like some grave, mighty thought threading a dream.' When the land droops under the gathering splendor of the year, its supplies are ready and exhaustless. Want never comes here, though she passes through all other lands. You may well believe that there is somewhere a struggle of childhood, weeping chasms, and deep pools, and noisy brooks. The determined voice at Syene, the gentle yet firm struggle at Silsilis, remind us of this. But the Nile alone has no history for inquisitive man. We know that a single stream, far above El Makyer, united with its currents, and gave the influence of power to the charm of beauty; but henceforth they two are alone. El Tayr, with her cliffs, frowns in vain. The plains of Thebes attempt her delay with unavailing praise.

The Nile moves gently

onward. The Arabs say, 'Those who float there ever praise Allah, whose smile it reflects, and must come again, for it is thoughtful in greatness and sublime in calmness.' And what stream was ever so devotedly loved as this! When it declines to meet the great sea, its last fields are richest and its last skies are clearest. Still smiling the Nile passes away, like Ceres, beholding the grain and flowers which were just scattered springing up upon every side. Without struggle or sadness, the river of Egypt is still loved, still worthy of the saying of its people, that with her the passions sleep and the heart wakes forever.'"-pp. 109, 113.

Our readers, we are quite sure, will not be content with our scant reviewal of this inviting work, but will hasten to make up for our enforced deficiency in its survey by giving themselves the pleasure of a leisurely perusal of the original. We have hardly touched upon its contents. Chapters with such suggestive headings as Heliopolis, Thebes, Luxor, Edfoo, Phila, Cairo, The Desert, we have passed in entire silence. Its eighty pictorial designs, some of them of exceeding beauty, we have no power to reproduce. A thoughtful spirit suffuses these records of the past and present with a moral attractiveness, that must greatly enhance the entertainment which they will afford, to contemplative minds.

ARTICLE V.

THE SERPENT IN EDEN AND THE FALL.

WE offer a contribution to this primitive subject, in a brief discussion of three points: the Temptation; the Tempter; and the Consequences of the transgression.

The Temptation, what was it? In what did it consist? In the second chapter of Genesis, 9th, 16th and 17th verses, we read as follows: "And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food: the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” . . . "And the Lord God commanded the man saying: Of every tree of the garden thou mayst freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and

evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The temptation then of Eden consisted in the inducements held out to taste of the fruit of a certain tree, called the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil." But an enlarged answer is demanded by the additional inquiry; why was this tree so called? We shall here present as succintly as possible several opinions of the learned which mostly agree. Poole in his Annotations says:

"It was so called with respect either (1) To God, who thereby would prove and make known man's good or evil, his obedience and happiness, or his rebellion and misery; or rather, (2) To man who by the use of it would know to his cost how great and good things he did enjoy, and might have kept by his obedience, and how evil and bitter the fruits of his disobedience were to himself and all his posterity."

Yet others say that it was so named in respect to Adam and Eve, who, by tasting it against the revealed will of God, should learn to know by woful experience a vast difference between the good of obedience and the evil of disobedience. Says Ainsworth in his commentary on Genesis, "It was so named because God's law which forbade man to eat of this tree should teach what is good and evil; be a rule of obedience, showing man's goodness and righteousness if he did obey, or his evil if he did transgress." Milton, in his "Christian Doctrine," has the following passages:

"It was necessary that something should be forbidden or commanded as a test of fidelity, and that an act in its own nature indifferent, in order that man's obedience might be thereby manifested." "It was called the tree of knowledge of good and evil from the event; for since Adam tasted it we not only know evil, but we know good only by means of evil."

In his "Paradise Lost" (iv. 426, 7) he says:

"God hath pronounced it death to taste that tree,
The only sign of our obedience left."

It will be perceived that the opinions quoted in the main coincide. More recent commentators might be cited to the same purport. All agree that the tree was a test tree; but whether a test by which God might know or prove whether man

would be good or evil; or a test by which man would know, by experience, good and evil, there is some disagreement. Before however stating any opinion, we wish to bring forward one more authority, an authority of more ancient date, and which has the sanction of our Saviour and the apostles, inasmuch as it was constantly used by them, the Septuagint. In this translation we read that the tree of knowledge was a tree by which to know what may be known of good and evil”: τὸ ξύλον τοῦ εἰδέναι γνωστὸν zakov zai norngov. In the same chapter we also read; "But of the tree by which to know good and evil”: ἀπὸ δὲ τοῦ ξύλου τοῦ givwozziv nahov zai norηgov. According to Ainsworth, the Chaldee and the Jerusalem Targums read thus: "the tree of whose fruit they that eat shall know the difference between good and evil." In these authorities the opinion that the tree of knowledge was a tree by which man was to know good and evil is evidently set forth. This opinion we are inclined to think the correct one. The acute Vitringa, however, stoutly combats it. Let us appeal to the record.

First, then, the language made use of by the serpent in the fifth verse, "For God doth know, that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods (or God, as the Chaldee has it, according to Dr. A. Clarke) knowing good and evil," was very probably used in the sense in which it was understood by Eve. The very next verse seems to intimate this. "She saw that it was a tree to make one wise;" and hence the great strength of the temptation. In the eleventh verse this is also plainly intimated: "Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?" Again in the twenty-second verse this seems also to be intimated. "And the Lord God said, Behold the man is become as one of us to know good and evil." There is, however, some dispute in regard to this last passage. Poole considers it as irony, and compares it with 1 Kings xviii. 27 and Eccl. xi. 9. Prof. Bush on the other hand adduces it as a proof in point.

We think it plain that the tree of knowledge was placed in the midst of the garden as a test-tree, from which if our first parents had abstained, they never would have known evil, neither good as contrasted with it, and thus filling them with