The visitor having noticed these objects has done with the Egyptian
room. It is well, however, to pause upon the threshold, and before
dismissing these interesting glimpses into the life, long since
scattered as dust, upon the soil of Egypt, to call to mind the
prominent points of the impressive story that may be read in the room
he is about to quit. He may wander back through the histories of ages
upon ages; pause before the revelations of Herodotus; and recall the
mighty romances of Homer; and, pausing even there, where all is so
dim, and little understood, turn once more to these fragmentary
monuments of a civilisation that existed even centuries before the
great Greek poet. So silently, for us of the present hour, time rolled
by in those days, that we fail to grasp the measure of the distance
which separates our fret and toil of the nineteenth century, from that
busy valley of the Nile; when the second Rameses reigned in all his
glory; when precise artists were ruling geometrical lines upon stones
to make their careful drawings; and painters, with their palm-fibre
brushes, all unconscious of the critics that lay yet silently in the
womb of time, who would shovel the dust and dirt of centuries from
before their works, and tell the story of Rameses from these rude
revelations. Curious thoughts crowd in every busy brain, before these
strange relics. Lost in the depths of the past, the mind, with a leap,
often grasps at the future; and men will be found seriously saying to
themselves, as they notice how we depend for our knowledge of ancient
Egyptian fabrics upon the shrouds of ancient Egyptians,--what, if we
looked forward, and in the remote centuries that are rolling toward
us, see all our vast and busy Lancashire some layers underground, and
archaeologists busy with our winding sheet! Well, at the least, these
thoughts are not idle. It does all of us good to think often of what
has been, and to dream of the future to which we are driving "down the
ringing grooves of time"--to think sometimes of the fine people who