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| MYSTERIOUS flood,—that through the silent sands | |
| Hast wandered, century on century, | |
| Watering the length of green Egyptian lands, | |
| Which were not, but for thee,— | |
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| Art thou the keeper of that eldest lore, | 5 |
| Written ere yet thy hieroglyphs began, | |
| When dawned upon thy fresh, untrampled shore | |
| The earliest life of man? | |
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| Thou guardest temple and vast pyramid, | |
| Where the gray Past records its ancient speech; | 10 |
| But in thine unrevealing breast lies hid | |
| What they refuse to teach. | |
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| All other streams with human joys and fears | |
| Run blended, o’er the plains of History: | |
| Thou tak’st no note of man; a thousand years | 15 |
| Are as a day to thee. | |
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| What were to thee the Osirian festivals? | |
| Or Memnon’s music on the Theban plain? | |
| The carnage, when Cambyses made thy halls | |
| Ruddy with royal slain? | 20 |
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| Even then thou wast a God, and shrines were built | |
| For worship of thine own majestic flood; | |
| For thee the incense burned,—for thee was spilt | |
| The sacrificial blood. | |
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| And past the bannered pylons that arose | 25 |
| Above thy palms, the pageantry and state, | |
| Thy current flowed, calmly as now it flows, | |
| Unchangeable as fate. | |
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| Thou givest blessing as a god might give, | |
| Whose being is his bounty: from the slime | 30 |
| Shaken from off thy skirts the nations live, | |
| Through all the years of Time. | |
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| In thy solemnity, thine awful calm, | |
| Thy grand indifference of Destiny, | |
| My soul forgets its pain, and drinks the balm | 35 |
| Which thou dost proffer me. | |
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| Thy godship is unquestioned still: I bring | |
| No doubtful worship to thy shrine supreme; | |
| But thus my homage as a chaplet fling, | |
| To float upon thy stream! | 40 |
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