The
human clay, now trampled and despised, will not be,--cannot be,--
knit into strength and light by accident or ordinances of
unassisted fate. By human cruelty and iniquity it has been
afflicted;--by human mercy and justice it must be raised: and, in
all fear or questioning of what is or is not, the real message of
creation, or of revelation, you may assuredly find perfect peace,
if you are resolved to do that which your Lord has plainly
required,--and content that He should indeed require no more of
you,--than to do Justice, to love Mercy, and to walk humbly with
Him.
NOTES.
NOTE I.
Page 26.
"That third pyramid of hers."
THROUGHOUT the dialogues, it must be observed that "Sibyl" is
addressed (when in play) as having once been the Cumaean Sibyl;
and "Egypt" as having been Queen Nitocris,--the Cinderella and
"the greatest heroine and beauty" of Egyptian story. The Egyptians
called her "Neith the Victorious" (Nitocris), and the Greeks "Face
of the Rose" (Rhodope). Chaucer's beautiful conception of
Cleopatra in the "Legend of Good Women," is much more founded on
the traditions of her than on those of Cleopatra; and, especially
in its close, modified by Herodotus's terrible story of the death
of Nitocris, which, however, is mythologically nothing more than a
part of the deep monotonous ancient dirge for the fulfillment of
the earthly destiny of Beauty: "She cast herself into a chamber
full of ashes.
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