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For the sun was setting, and the sky flamed into colour. "A parting of the ways," said Jane; "a place of choice. How difficult to know which to choose liberty or fruitfulness. One would have to consult the Sphinx wise old guardian of the ages, silent keeper of Time's secrets, gazing on into the future as It has always gazed, while future became present, and present glided into past.
Thebes now falls, and Thereander, the son of Polynices, is made king. The legends of Thebes have furnished the great tragedians Sophocles and Euripides, with their finest subjects. In the fable of the Sphinx we trace a connection between Thebes and ancient Egypt. But all the legends of ancient Greece yield in interest to that of Troy, which Homer chose as the subject of his immortal epic.
I believe that our hero would have risen to the highest position of dignity on earth, the Presidency of the United States, if he had not unwittingly aroused the jealousy of the terrible heathen god. When he chose a wife from the lovely maidens of Prescott, then the vengeful Sphinx laid its sinister plans for his undoing, for it is in the nature of cats, small or great, to be exceedingly jealous.
When he looked back on the fate and deeds of nations, on the remotest horizon where the thread of history was scarcely perceptible, that same gigantic Sphinx was there the first and earliest monument of human joy in creative art those Pyramids which still proudly stood in undiminished and inaccessible majesty beyond the Nile, beyond the ruined capital of his forefathers, at the foot of the Libyan range.
They took long walks through the streets, and sometimes into the surrounding country always going one way and returning another, the Sphinx being very careful never to bring the King back by the same road or street by which they went.
"By the way," said the Sphinx, after they had walked an hour or more, "if you want to see a kingdom where there really is something to learn, you ought to go to the country of the Gaumers, which we are now approaching." "All right," said the King. "Let us go there." In the course of the afternoon they reached the edge of a high bluff.
A little nonsense is a great healer of the heart, and by means of such nonsense as this we grew merry again. And anon we grew sentimental and poetic, but thank heaven! we were no longer tragic. Presently I had news for the Sphinx. 'The rose-tree that grows in the garden of my mind, I said, 'desires to blossom.
Chance has since that time thrown me very often in her way, and she as often has directed a discourse to me which I do not understand. This barbarity has kept me ever at a distance from the most beautiful object my eyes ever beheld. It is thus also she deals with all mankind, and you must make love to her, as you would conquer the sphinx, by posing her.
"Here is your franc," said Rastignac, holding out the coin to the sphinx in the black wig.
Time, however, is the suzerain before whom every king, even Sorrow himself, bows at last. The rights of Rossetti’s admirers can no longer be set at nought, and I am making arrangements to publish within the present year ‘Jan Van Hunks’ and the ‘Sphinx Sonnets,’ the former of which will show a new and, I think, unexpected side of Rossetti’s genius.
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