"How long has it stood so, I wonder? Since creation?" said the voice of "H. T.," "or did the Flood hurl those masses of stone into so unaccountable an accidental position?"
"Haven't the most remote idea!" answered Rowan, gayly. "I have often thought of it, though, when looking at the marvel in the sunlight. But I have never been able to get any farther back than the idea how the winds must have howled and the rains beaten around that immobile face, age after age, while whole generations of the men after whom the face is apparently copied as a mockery, have been catching cold and dying from a mere puff of air on the head or a pair of wet feet."
"The eternal—the immovable!" said "H. T.," his voice so solemn and impressive that it was evident his words were only a faint representation of the inner feeling.
"I know one thing that it has been, without a doubt," said Rowan. "When the whole country was filled with Indians of a somewhat nobler character than the miserable wretches that alternately beg and murder on the Western plains, there is not much question that they must have worshipped it as the face of the Great Manitou, looking down upon them in anger or in love, as the storm-cloud swept around it or the summer sun tinted it with an iron smile."
Halstead Rowan was speaking unconscious poetry, as many another man of his disposition has done, while those who sought to make it a trade have been hammering their dull brains and spoiling much good paper in the mere stringing of rhymes bearing the same relation to poetry that an onion does to the bulb of a tulip! Whether his companion caught the tone from him and merely elaborated it into another utterance, or whether he possessed the fire within himself and this rencontre was only the means of bringing out the spark, is something not now to be decided. But he spoke words that not only made the other turn and gaze upon him for a moment with astonishment, but moved the three unseen auditors with feelings which neither could very well analyze. His dark face, tinted by the moonlight as the stony brow of the mountain was itself touched and hallowed, seemed rapt as those of the seers of old are sometimes said to have been; and his voice was strangely sweet and melodious:
"To me, just now," he said, "that iron face is assuming a new shape."
"The deuce it is!" answered Rowan. "Where?"
"'In my mind's eye, Horatio!'" quoted the speaker, and the other seemed to understand something of his mood. "Do you know that face may be nothing more than sixty feet of strangely-shaped stone, to others; but to me, at this moment, it is the Spirit of the North looking sadly down over our fields of conflict and saying words that I almost hear. Listen, and see if you do not hear them, too!"
How strangely earnestness sometimes impresses us, even when little else than madness is the motive power! Halstead Rowan, by no means a man to be easily moulded to the fancies of any other, found himself insensibly turning his ear towards the Sphynx, as if it was indeed speaking through the still night air!
"'I am the Soul of the Nation,'" the singular voice went on, speaking as if for the lips of stone. "'Storms have raved around my forehead and thunders have shaken my base, but nothing has moved me! Scarred I may have been by the lightning and discolored by the beating rain, but the hand of man cannot touch me, and even the elements can disturb me not. I have seen ten thousand storms, and not one but was followed by the bright sunshine, because Nature was ever true to itself. Be but true to yourselves, loyal men of the great American Union, and the nation you love shall yet be throned above the reach of treason as I am throned above the touch of man—unapproachable in its power as I am fearful in my eternal isolation!'"