"A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,
And most divinely fair";
her only image of human beauty the reflex of her white, symmetric limbs, her wide, dark eyes, her full lips and soft Egyptian features, wherewith the river greeted her from its blue placidity; her only sense of love the unspoken yearning within, when the soft, tumultuous stress of the west-wind kissed her, who should have been clasped in tender arms and caressed by loving lips; whose dumb, creative instincts, becoming genius instead of maternity, struggled outward from their home in heart and brain to culminate in this world's-wonder, and so build a monument namelessly splendid to the grand nature that found its bread of life was a stone and perished: or whether this creature were the fashioning of some demigod,—"for there were giants in those days,"—who, in the fulness of his strength, despairing of a mortal mate, wandered away from men and wrought his patience and his longing into the rock,—as lesser men have carved their memorials on hard Fate,—and then died between its paws, sated with labor and glad to sleep: or whether, indeed, the captive spirits, sealed in Caucasus with the seal of Solomon, did penance for their rebellion in mortal work on mere dull matter, and with anguished essence toiled for ages to mimic in her own clay the dumb pathos of waiting Earth:—whichever of these dreams be nearest truth, one thing is true,—that the maker of the Sphinx infused into his work, in as much greater measure as his nature was greater than that of other men, that yearning of pathetic solitude that most wrings a woman's heart; and the outward semblance, working in, wrought upon the heavy stone with incessant and accumulative power, till through that sluggish sandstone crept a confused thrill of consciousness, and the great creature felt the loneliness that she looked. Far away below her the Nile-valley teemed with life; the antelopes coursed beside their young to feed on the green pasture fresh from its long overflow; red foxes sported with their cubs on the tawny sand; the birds taught their infant offspring their own sweet arts of flight and song on every bough; and even the ostrich, lonely Desert-runner, heaped her treasure of white eggs in the sand, or guided her callow young far from the sight and fear of man;—but the Sphinx sat alone.
Mightier and mightier grew the yearning within her, as the full moon floated upward from the east and cast her dewy dreams over land and sea. The hour was come; the whole impulse and persistence of her nature went out in vivid life, and, filling the very stones which the winds had gathered and piled against her breast, cleft them with its sentient spell, clothed them with lean flesh and wiry sinews, shaped them after the fashion of the Desert men, and sent them out alive with intellect and will, but with hearts of flint, into the wide world,—the Sphinx's children!
With a sigh that shook the shores of Egypt and smote the Sicilian midnight with sickening vibrations of earthquake, the Sphinx beheld this culmination of her great desire; in the very hour of fruition, hope fled; and as this grim certainty sped away from before her, taking with it all her borrowed life, she dropped that majestic head lower upon her bosom, uplifted it again for one last look at her offspring, and so stiffened,—once more a stone.
Age after age rolled by; storm and tempest hurled their thunders at her head; wave after wave of bright insidious sand curled about her feet and heaped its sliding grains against her side; men came and went in fleeting generations, and seasons fled like hours through the whirling wheel of Time; but the Sphinx longed and suffered no more. Her hour had come and gone; her dull instinct had burnt out, her comely outline began to disintegrate, her face grew blank and stony, her features crumbled away, altars and inscriptions defaced her breast and hieroglyphed her ponderous sides, men worshipped and wondered there, and travellers from lands beyond the sun pitched their tents before her face and defiled her feet with barbaric orgies; but she knew it no more,—her children were gone out into the world. And the world had need of them. Its rank and miasmatic civilization,—its hotbeds of sin and misery,—its civil corruptions and its social lies,—its reeling, rotten principalities,—its sickly atmosphere of effeminate luxury, wherein neither justice nor judgment lived, and the solitary virtues left mere effete shadows of philanthropy and cowardly impulses called love and mercy,—needed a new race, stony and strong, unshrinking in conquest and reformation, full of zeal, and incapable of pity, to rend away the fogs that smothered truth and decency, to disperse the low-lying clouds of weak passion and maudlin luxury, to blow a reveille clear and keen as the trumpet of the northwest wind, when it sweeps down from its mountain-tops in stern exultation, and shouts its Puritanic battle-psalm across the reeking, steaming meadows of sultry August, fever-smitten and pestilent.
Such were the Sphinx's children: had they but died out with their need! Here and there a monk, fresh from his Desert-Laura, hurtles through the eclipse-light of history like the stone from a catapult,—rules a church with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and emperors with the grand audacity of a commission presumedly divine, while Greeks cringe, and Jews blaspheme, and heathen flee into, or away from, conversion; and the Church itself canonizes this spiritual father, this Sphinx-son of an instinct and a stone!
Or an Emperor exalted himself above the legions and the populace of Rome, banqueted his enemies and beheaded them at table, drank in the sight of blood and the sound of human shrieks as if they were his natural light and air, tormented God's creatures and cursed his kind, kindled a fire among the miserable myriads of his own city, and, exulting in a safe height, mixed the leaping, frantic discords of his own music with the horrid sounds of the hell's tragedy below him; seething in crime, steeped in murder, black with blasphemy, the horror and the hate of men, death gaped for his coming, and he went! Men revile him through all posterior ages; women shudder at the legend of his deeds; but the Sphinx stands unconscious in the Desert,—she knew not her child!
Or a Reformer springs up. High above his birthplace the snowy Alps paint themselves against the sky, an aerial dream of beauty, softened by the tender hues of dawn and sunset, serenely fair through the rift of the tempest; even their white death takes a nameless grace from distance and atmosphere, clothing itself in beauty as a spirit in clay, and tempting wanderers to their graves: but no such beauty clothes the man whose daily vision beholds them; hard, clamorous, disputatious, with one hand he rends the rotten splendors of Rome from its tottering Image, and with the other plunges baby-souls to inevitable damnation; strong and fiercely rigid, full of burning and slaughter for the idolatries and harlotries of Popery, fired with lurid zeal, and bestriding one stringent idea, he rides on over dead and living, preaches predestination and hell as if the Gospel dwelt only upon destiny and despair, casts no tender look at the loving piety that underlay shrines and woman-worship and bead-counting wherever a true heart sought its God through the sole formulas it knew, but spurs forward to the end, a mighty power to destroy, to do away with old corruptions and break down idols on their altars,—saint and iconoclast! Did the heart of stone within him know its ancestry,—track its hard, loveless descent from the Sphinx's children?
Then a Queen;—a solitary woman, proud of her solitude, isolated in her regnant splendor, a dead planet like the moon, sung and pictured and adored, but keeping on her majestic path in awful beauty, deaf to human entreaty, cold to human love; a great statesman in a queen's robes; a keen, subtle politician, coifed and farthingaled; a revengeful sovereign; a deadly enemy; a woman who forgave nothing to a woman, and retaliated everything upon a man; she who brought unshrinkingly to death a sister queen discrowned and captive, a sister whose grace and loveliness and kindly aspect might have moved the lions of the arena to fawn upon her, but nowise disarmed the tigress who lapped her blood; she who banished and slew the man she would not stoop to love, because he dared to love another; and when death stared her in the face, and open-eyed judgment shook her soul, rose from that death-pallet to grapple and abuse a false woman, penitent for and confessing her falseness; a virgin-monarch, pitiless, relentless, cruel as jealousy; an anomalous woman, were she not a stone-born child of the Sphinx!
Or a great General, before whose iron will horse and horseman quailed and fled, like dry stubble before flame; who wielded the sword of Gideon, and cut off the armies of his kindred people and his anointed king as a mower fells the glittering grass on a summer dawn, heedless that he, too, shall be cut down from his flourishing. On his track fire and blood spread their banners, and the raven scented his trophies afar off; age and youth alike were crushed under the tread of his war-horse; honor and valor and life's best prime opposed him as summer opposes the Arctic hail-fury, and lay beaten into mire at his feet. Hated, feared, followed to the death; victorious or vanquished, the same strong, imperturbable, sullen nature; persistent rather than patient in effort, vigorously direct in action; a minister of unconscious good, of half-conscious evil; stern and gloomy to the sacrilegious climax of his well-battled life, even in the regicidal act going as one driven to his deeds by Fate that forgot God;—was he to be wondered at, whose life, in ages far gone, began among the stony Sphinx children?