THE PROFILE. 239 



Sitting here to-night, I recall that face as you and I have 

 seen it so often repeated on images throughout Egypt, 

 always the same smiling countenance of majesty, unlike 

 every other face in Egyptian sculpture. I can imagine 

 to-night the starlight vanishing and the dawn breaking on 

 that cold brow (for it is not yet midnight here, but the 

 day is rising in Egypt), and I can see the smile with which 

 the old image welcomes again, as so often, the calm clear 

 dawn. That smile, the mystery of the Sphinx, I think we 

 can understand. For in Egypt there shall be, and that 

 before long, a new race and a new throne, and the tem- 

 ples that for two thousand years have been waiting for 

 worshipers shall be filled, and the dream of the old Egyp- 

 tian, who built them for these later years as well as his 

 own times, will be almost realized. There is hope in the 

 smile of the Sphinx. But yonder old man of rock looks 

 over hills from which a race has vanished never to re- 

 turn. Not alone the race that I have imagined in the re- 

 mote ages, but a later, a noble race, who will be forgotten 

 like that other; who are already so forgotten that men 

 can not name them in their own tongue, but speak of them 

 as a people nameless and unknown. For them there is 

 no hope ; and the old watcher for morning on the Fran- 

 conia hills waits for no morning light on the people that 

 have looked lovingly up to him for a thousand years. His 

 face may well be sad forever." 



" Fancies, John, but more satisfying sometimes than re- 

 alities. Nevertheless I think you wrong the old man's 

 expression. You are correct in this that his countenance 

 indicates expectation, and I think it has also some very 

 little but far-off hope united with that look of waiting; 

 and this half hopeful half despairing look of waiting is what 

 gives him to my eye his chief grandeur. The things that 



