_Speech of Alhadra, in Coleridge's Remorse_

[7] "_The guard_."--I know not whether the word is a local one in this
sense. What I mean is a sort of fender, four or five feet high, which
locks up the fire from too near an approach on the part of children.

[8] "_Memnonian_."--For the sake of many readers, whose hearts may go
along earnestly with a record of infant sorrow, but whose course of life
has not allowed them much leisure for study, I pause to explain--that the
head of Memnon, in the British Museum, that sublime head which wears upon
its lips a smile coextensive with all time and all space, an Aeonian
smile of gracious love and Pan-like mystery, the most diffusive and
pathetically divine that the hand of man has created, is represented, on
the authority of ancient traditions, to have uttered at sunrise, or soon
after as the sun's rays had accumulated heat enough to rarefy the air
within certain cavities in the bust, a solemn and dirge-like series of
intonations; the simple explanation being, in its general outline, this--
that sonorous currents of air were produced by causing chambers of cold
and heavy air to press upon other collections of air, warmed, and
therefore rarefied, and therefore yielding readily to the pressure of
heavier air. Currents being thus established by artificial arrangements
of tubes, a certain succession of notes could be concerted and sustained.
Near the Red Sea lies a chain of sand hills, which, by a natural system
of grooves inosculating with each other, become vocal under changing
circumstances in the position of the sun, &c. I knew a boy who, upon
observing steadily, and reflecting upon a phenomenon that met him in his
daily experience, viz., that tubes, through which a stream of water was
passing, gave out a very different sound according to the varying
slenderness or fulness of the current, devised an instrument that yielded
a rude hydraulic gamut of sounds; and, indeed, upon this simple