tions, and curiously comparing their little black shoes with his red slippers.
What an open eye, nevertheless, our tourist has for the sublime and beautiful in Egyptian life, or life in death, may be seen in every section of his sketch-book. Witness his description of the temples at Aboo Simbel, and the solemn session there of kingly colossi—figures of Rameses the Great, "breathing grandeur and godly grace"—the stillness of their beauty "steeped in a placid passion, that seems passionlessness"—the beautiful balance of serene wisdom, and the beautiful bloom of eternal youth in their faces, with no trace there of the possibility of human emotion[1]—a type of beauty alone in sculpture, serene and godlike. Witness, too, his picture of the tombs of the kings at Thebes—of the Memnonium—of Karnak, "older than history, yet fresh, as if just ruined for the romantic," as though Cambyses and his Persians had marched upon Memphis only last week—and of the Sphinx, grotesque darling of the desert, "its bland gaze serious and sweet," a voice inaudible seeming to trail from its "thinned and thinning lips," declaring its riddle still unread, while its eyes are expectantly settled toward the East, whence they dropped not "when Cambyses or Napoleon came."
Young America is much given to Carlylish phraseology, and Mr. Curtis deals largely on his own account in this questionable line. This is one of the "conceits" which prejudice many against him. He loves to repeat, in the Latter-day Pamphleteer's fashion, certain compound epithets, indifferently felicitous at times, of his own coinage—as "Banyan Pilots," "Poet Harriet" (scil. Miss Martineau), "beaming elderly John Bull," "Rev. Dr. Duck," "Mutton Suet," and "Wind and Rain." This habit of "calling names" has set many a matter-of-fact reader against him. More, however, have taken exception to his prolonged description of the dancing-girls of Esue—a voluptuous theme, on which 'tis pity that chapter after chapter should find him "still harping," with voluntary and variations not attuned to healthy English taste. But it is a mistake to pronounce him all levity and quicksilver—to deny him a heart that can ache with deep feeling, or a brain that can throb with generous and elevated thought. Capricious he is, and eccentric, waywardly independent in outspoken habits—dashingly reckless in his
- ↑ Mr. Curtis's impressions of Egyptian sculpture remind us of a passage in the English Opium-eater's writings, in reference to the Memmon's head, which, then recently brought from Egypt, struck him as "simply the sublimest sight which in this sight-seeing world he had seen." Regarding it as not a human but as a symbolic head, he read there, he tells us, "First: the peace which passeth all understanding. Secondly: the eternitv which baffles and confounds all faculty of computation; the eternity which had been, the eternity which was to be. Thirdly: the diffusive love, not such as rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and swells by undulations of time, but a procession—an emanation from some mystery of endless dawn. You durst not call it a smile that radiated from the lips, the radiation was too awful to clothe itself in adumbrations or memorials of flesh .… The atmosphere … was the breathlessness which belongs to a saintly trance; the holy thing seemed to live by silence." Surely the Memnon's head must have been a sublime and oft-recurring presence in the Opium-eater's dreams—and a national set-off, we would hope, against the horrors of being kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles (see "Confessions"), and lost with unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
