and sparkling from the Mint at
Philadelphia. The one antiquated, rude, corroded, and begrimed in its
long conflict with time, and the other bright and vivid, its field and
exergue unmarred, its emblems and legends clear and sharp. The coin of
Ptolemy has a history. The obverse gives us undoubtedly the head of
Jupiter, the cloud bearer, rugged, massive, stern, iron featured,
taurine neck, hair in great serpentine coils and shocks; the reverse, a
magnificent spread eagle, and the inscription in Greek, _Basileus
Ptolemaion_. Ptolemy, flushed with the victory he had won for Alexander,
issued it over two thousand years ago. After subserving the purposes of
Athenian barter, some swarthy Egyptian obtained it; but our friend the
Egyptian, in time, was gathered to his fathers. He was embalmed, and
slept in the shadow of the Pyramid, where his royal predecessors were
sleeping, and by the side of the eternal Sphynx, whose riddle he could
not read in life. Perhaps death unsealed the mystery of those stony lips
to him. The token was placed in the mummy case upon the Egyptian's lips,
perhaps as Charon's toll. But, in that event, evidently our friend the
Egyptian never crossed over the black river of Death, but is still
wandering--a miserable shade--along its banks, seeking rest, and finding
none. Token and Egyptian remained in their tomb while Thebes flourished
and decayed, Tyre and Sidon crumbled into ruins, Rome, mistress of the
world, cowered beneath the scourge of Goth and Vandal and Hun, and the
earth was eclipsed in the night of the ages. Still the Pyramids towered
toward heaven, the Sphynx gazed on with calm, earnest eyes, Memnon made
music of welcome to the sun, and our token sealed the shrivelled silent
lips of the Egyptian. The world emerged from its night. Dante and
Aquinas, Copernicus and Galileo, Luther and Melanchthon, Gutenberg and
Faust, Kant and Schlegel, Bacon, Leibnitz and Newton, Watt and Morse,
tore away the seals before our token saw the light. It came forth into a
new world by the hand of a missionary, preaching a religion founded
three hundred years after it closed the lips of the Egyptian. The
heathen god was upon its field, but the Christian religion had set aside
the old mythology of which it was a representative. I turn from this
relic of the past to the coin of the present, and upon the latter I find
the acknowledgment of that religion, and of dependence upon its
immutable Author: 'In God we trust;' and fro