has a dim feeling of excitement added to his
admiration from the lurking antagonism of the fugacious life attached to
this ebullient power, and the awful repulsion between that final
tendency and the meridian development of the strength. Hence, therefore,
the secret rapture in bringing forward tropical life--the shooting of
enormous power from darkness, the kindling in the midst of winter and
sterility of irrepressible, simultaneous, tropical vegetation--the
victorious surmounting of foliage, blossoms, flowers, fruits--burying
and concealing the dreary vestiges of desolation.

Reply to the fact that Xerxes wept over his forces, by showing that in
kind, like the Jewish, the less ignoble superstition of Persia--which
must in the time of Balaam, if we suppose the Mesotam meant to have been
the tract between the Euphrates and the Tigris, have been almost
coincident with the Jewish as to the unity of God--had always, amidst
barbarism arising from the forces moulding social sentiment, prompted a
chivalry and sensibility far above Grecian. For how else account for the
sole traits of Christian sensibility in regard to women coming forward
in the beautiful tale of the Armenian prince, whose wife when asked for
her opinion of Cyrus the Conqueror, who promised to restore them all to
liberty and favour (an act, by the way, in itself impossible to Greek
feelings, which exhibit no one case of relinquishing such rights over
captives) in one hour, replied that she knew not, had not remarked his
person; for that _her_ attention had been all gathered upon that prince,
meaning her youthful husband, who being asked by the Persian king what
sacrifice he would esteem commensurate to the recovery of his bride,
answered so fervently, that life and all which it contained were too
slight a ransom to pay. Even that answer was wholly impossible to a
Grecian. And again the beautiful catastrophe in the tale of Abradates
and Panthea--the gratitude with which both husband and wife received the
royal gift of restoration to each other's arms, implying a sort of holy
love inconceivable to a state of Polygamy--the consequent reaction of
their thought in testifying this gratitude; and as war unhappily offered
the sole chance for displaying it, the energy of Panthea in adorning
with her own needle the habiliments of her husband--the issuing forth
and parting on the morning of battle--the principle of upright duty and
of immeasurable gratitude in Abradates f