140 MAMMON'S MARTYRS. sionary of the cross leaves behind him the privileges of a civilized land and the familiar faces of home and neighborhood, but he looks to be more than remunerated by the flowers that at his bidding shall spring up in bloom and fragrance on the desert of the human heart in whose soil he will cast the seed of heaven. But Mammon's martyr is content to endure an equal if not greater self-denial from motives far more humble and moderate. You need not tempt him with vast and magnificent promises. You need not speak to him of an infinite reward. You can make a small piece of paper no bigger than your hand, with a few black marks upon it, represent all that can rouse the faculties of his soul, and stir him to the most enthusiastic and persevering effort. It needs no more than that to develop his powers and exhaust his energies. It kindles a devotion that employs all his thoughts, that pervades his waking hours, and disturbs his dreams. He carries it with him everywhere. It crosses the threshold of the sanctuary with him, and occupies his thoughts while he hears the preacher's voice. It is so uniform and soul-absorbing, that the din of business never disturbs it. Years do not abate its force or quench its zeal. It glows bright even amid the deepening shadows of age. We should not so much wonder at it, if it was grasping some great and almost unearthly prize, but it is chasing a bauble, a shadow. Is there not something magnificent in this-something that Satan might well consider the moral sublime -that all the energies of a soul created for immortality are concentrated for a lifetime-for the whole space of a probation-on what some despite as a toy or a trinket? Talk no more of Christian austerity. Mammon's martyr endures far more. Talk not of Christian fanaticism or enthusiasm. The devotion of martyrs for the truth is scarcely to be compared with that of the man who bows to "His Majesty" the Dollar. "Why call the man then miserable? As Before was said, the frugal life is his, Which in a saint or cynic ever was The theme of praise; a hermit would not miss Surely, we may call on the Christian world to by a self-denial which time can scarcely parallel, clothing themselves in rags, starving their bodies and their intellects at once, flinging remorselessly overboard conscience and responsibility, like the lumber of cotton bales, to save the sinking of the vessel of their wealth; venturing desperate projects to pile their hoards a grain higher. These men you may indeed call fanatics, but you must not laugh at them. In devotion to their ruling principle, their course is admirable. No Christian can be proud of being styled a fanatic, after their story is told. He does not deserve the title. It belongs to another class altogether. If any thing more was needed to heighten our admiration of Mammon's martyrs-the men who voluntarily suffer and perish in his service—it is the cold neglect with which their memory is often treated. Their names not infrequently are cast out as evil. The world, proverbially ungrateful, leaves them to contempt. Titles of reproach are heaped upon them. They are sometimes treated with scorn and loathing. They are called penurious, miserly, contracted, selfish, hateful. You may say of them what Cowper said of the martyrs of truth: "With their deeds No bard embalms or sanctifies his song." The grave is sometimes a refuge for them from the persecuting obloquy of the world. Is it not singular that such characters should exist-more singular still, that their exemplary devotion and martyrdom are so derided No expectation of thanks for their toil lightens their departing hours. They must walk through the dark valley, and find their wealth a broken staff as they go. Men curse their memory as they leave the world. And yet, with all this prospect before them, they never flinch from devotion to their principle. They adhere to their creed. You cannot reason them out of it. You cannot shame them out of it. Who can fail to admire such steadfast fidelity | It is bad enough that their memories should be so vilely treated. But the worst of all is, they deserve it. VELOCITY OF SOUND.-In a still night, the voices of the workmen at the distillery at Battersea may be heard at Westminster Bridge, a distance of three miles. The watch-word at Portsmouth, it is said, can be heard at Ryde, in the Isle of Wight, a distance of four or five miles. The echo in Woodstock Park is repeated seventeen times by day and twenty by night. The artillery at the siege of Genoa by the French, was heard at Leghorn, a distance of ninety miles. PROPHECIES FULFILLED. 141 DIRGE. BY META LANDER. SLUMBER on, thou darling child; Thou shalt slumber while we weep. Now thy gentle form is dressed In a robe of spotless white; Snow-flowers laid upon thy breast, Ready for thy quiet night. Eagerly thy hands no more Are stretched out the flowers to hold; But thy bosom folded o'er Are those lily-hands so cold. Room beneath the fresh-made clod! PROPHECIES FULFILLED. BABYLON. BY STEPHEN H. TYNG, D. D. BABYLON was the capital city of Babylonia, an ancient kingdom founded by the first descendants of Noah, soon after the deluge, and enlarged by Nimrod, his great-grandson, about two thousand years before the birth of Christ. Many additions were made to it by Queen Semiramis, and it was greatly strengthened and beautified by various succeeding sovereigns: but it was Nebuchadnezzar and his daughter Nitocris who brought it to such a degree of magnificence and splendor as rendered it one of the wonders of the world. Babylon stood in the midst of a large plain, in a very deep and fruitful soil. It was divided into two parts by the river Euphrates, which flowed through the city from north to south. Both these divisions were enclosed by one wall; and the whole formed a complete square, four hundred and eighty furlongs, or sixty miles, in compass. The walls were of extraordinary strength, being eighty-seven feet broad, capable of admitting six chariots abreast to run upon them, and three hundred feet high. On each side of the river Euphrates was built a quay and high wall, of the same thickness with the walls around the city. The entrances to the city were by one hundred gates, of immense size, made of solid brass; and the two parts of the city were connected by a remarkable stone bridge across the river. To prevent inconvenience from the swellings of the river, two canals were cut, above the city, by which the superabundant waters were carried off into the Tigris. Besides, prodigious embankments were made, effectually to confine the stream within its channel, and as a security against inundation. The materials for these stupendous works were taken, principally, from the western side of the city, where an extraordinary lake was dug, the depth of which was thirty-five feet, and its circumference forty-five miles. At the two ends of the bridge were two magnificent palaces, which had a subterraneous communication with each other, by means of a vault or tunnel under the bed of the river. The old palace, on the east side, was about thirty furlongs in compass, surrounded by three separate walls. The new palace on the opposite side was about four times as large as the other, and is said to have been eight miles in circumference. Within this palace were artificial hanging gardens, consisting of large terraces, raised one above another, till they equalled the walls of the city, and were designed to represent a woody country, having large trees planted on them, in soil of sufficient depth. Near to the old palace stood the temple of Belus, forming a square nearly three miles in compass. In the middle of the temple was an immense tower, six hundred feet in height. This large pile of building consisted of eight towers, each seventy-five feet high, and which were ascended by stairs winding round the outside. On this temple of Belus, or, as some say, on its summit, was a golden image forty feet in height, and equal in value to three and a half millions sterling. There was, besides, such a multitude of other statues and sacred utensils, that the whole of the treasure contained in this single edifice has been estimated at forty-two millions of pounds sterling. These things displayed the vast wealth and power of the Babylonian empire, and were certainly among the mightiest works of mortals. Babylon was called the glory of kingdoms, the golden city, the lady of kingdoms, and the praise of the whole earth: but its pride, idolatry, and wickedness have been visited in its utter desolation, agreeably to the inspired predictions of the holy prophets : Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in fron generation to generation; neither shall the Ara bian pitch his tent there; neither shall the shep. herds make their fold there. But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shal 142 PROPHECIES FULFILLED. be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell val; that its princes, nobles, and captains, being there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild drunk with their feasting, were suddenly slaughbeasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate tered, and that the glorious city, never before conhouses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: quered, was thus taken, without the knowledge and her time is near to come, and her days shall of the king, till the posts and messengers ran with not be prolonged. For I will rise up against the information, which he had scarcely time to them, saith the Lord of hosts, and cut off from receive and understand, before he was also numBabylon the name, and remnant, and son, and bered among the multitudes of the slain. Babynephew, saith the Lord. I will also make it a lon soon began to decline: its lofty walls were possession for the bittern, and pools of water: reduced to only a quarter of their original height; and I will sweep it with the besom of destruc- and from an imperial it was reduced to a tribution, saith the Lord of hosts. Thus saith the tary city. Xerxes, a successor of Cyrus on the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand Persian throne, seized the sacred treasures, plunI have holden, to subdue nations before him; dered the temples, and destroyed the images of and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before precious metal. Alexander attempted to restore him the two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not Babylon to its former glory; and designed to be shut: I will go before thee, and make the make it the metropolis of a universal empire. crooked places straight: I will break in pieces Ten thousand men were employed in repairing the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of the embankments of the Euphrates and the temiron; and I will give thee the treasures of dark-ple of Belus: the death of Alexander occasioned ness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, who call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel. Publish, and conceal not say, Babylon is taken, Bel is confounded, Merodach is broken in pieces; her idols are confounded, her images are broken in pieces. Because of the wrath of the Lord, it shall not be inhabited, but it shall be wholly decolate: every one that goeth by Babylon shall be astonished, and hiss at all her plagues. Come against her from the utmost border, open her storehouses: cast her up as heaps, and destroy her utterly: let nothing of her be left. One post shall run to meet another, and one messenger to meet another, to show the king of Babylon that his city is taken at one end. And Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling-place for dragons, an astonishment, and a hissing, without an inhabitant." The particulars of the siege of Babylon are detailed by Herodotus and Xenophon, two eminent heathen historians. In exact accordance with the inspired predictions of Isaiah and Jeremiah, they say, that Cyrus, with a large army of the Medes and Persians, besieged Babylon; that the Babylonians, conceiving their walls impreg nable, could not be provoked to an engagement; that Cyrus contrived a snare for the Babylonians, by turning the course of the river Euphrates through the great lake; that the waters being thus dried up, the soldiers marched to the bridge in the channel of the river; that, from the negligence of the guards, some of the gates leading from the river to the city were left open; that the troops of Cyrus, entering by this means, took Babylon during the night of an idolatrous festi the abandonment of the work. About a hundred and thirty years before the birth of Christ, a Parthian conqueror destroyed the fairest parts of Babylon. Several new cities, especially Seleucia, called New Babylon, were built by successive sovereigns in those regions, for the purpose of immortalizing their own names; by which the population of the old city was drained. After the commencement of the Christian Era, Babylon was but very thinly peopled; and wide spaces within its walls were brought under cultivation. Babylon continued to decline, and its desolations to increase till, in the fourth century, its walls formed an enclosure for the breeding of wild beasts; and it was thus made a hunting-park for the Persian monarchs. A long series of ages succeeded, in which no record was made concerning it; while, as the prophets testified, it was approaching utter desolation. The site on which Babylon stood has been completely ascertained; and the ruins have been visited and described by several intelligent English travellers. From being the "glory of king. doms," Babylon is now the greatest of ruins; and after the lapse of two thousand four hundred years, it exhibits to the view of every traveller the precise scene defined by the prophets of God. The name and remnant are cut off from Babylon. There the Arabian pitches not his tent: there the shepherds make not their folds; but wild beasts of the desert lie there, and their houses are full of doleful creatures. It is a place for the bittern, and a dwelling-place for dragons: it is a dry land and a desert-a burnt mountain SONNENBERG. -empty-wholly desolate-pools of waterheaps and utterly destroyed-a land where no man dwelleth-every one that passes by it is astonished. The superstitious dread of evil spirits, and the natural terror at the wild beasts which dwell among the ruins of Babylon, restrain the Arab from pitching his tent, or shepherds from making their folds there. The princely palaces and habitations of the wondrous city, utterly destroyed, are now nothing but unshapely heaps of bricks and rubbish: instead of their stately chambers, there are now caverns, where porcupines creep, and owls and bats nestle; where lions find dens, and jackals, hyænas, and other noxious animals, their unmolested retreats, from which issue loathsome smells, and the entrances to which are strewed with the bones of sheep and goats. On one sides of the Euphrates the canals are dry, and the crumbled bricks on an elevated surface exposed to the scorching sun, cover an arid plain; and Babylon is a wilderness, a dry land, a desert. On the other, the embankments of the river, and with them the vestiges of ruins over a large space, have been swept away: the plain is in general marshy, and in many places inaccessible, especially after the annual overflowing of the Euphrates: no son of man doth pass thereby; the sea or river is come upon Babylon, she is covered with the multitude of the waves thereof. Birs Nimrod, or the temple of Belus, which was standing after the beginning of the Christian era, is still to be distinguished. It has been visited by several modern English travellers, who have described it as a mere heap of ruins, resembling a high hill. It is still worthy, from its mere immensity, of being a relic of Babylon the great: for though a mass of ruins, it is no less than two hundred and thirty-five feet high. On these ruins there are vast fragments of brickwork that have been completely molten, which ring like glass, and which must have been subjected to a heat equal to that of the strongest furnace. From the summit of this mass may be had a distinct view of the frightful heaps which constitute all that now remains of ancient and glorious Babylon; and a more complete picture of absolute desolation could scarcely be imagined. Thus we behold the proudest works of the greatest of mortals brought to nothing, and the loftiest monuments of their power, genius, and riches, levelled with the dust, and preserved in ruins, for the purpose of illustrating and con 143 firming the faithful testimony of the eternal God, as recorded in his most holy Word. How wonderful are the predictions of his commissioned servants, when compared with the events to which they direct our minds; and what a convincing, demonstrative proof do we see of the truth and divinity of the Holy Scriptures! With what admirable propriety does Jehovah allege this memorable instance of his foreknowledge in relation to Babylon, and challenge all the false divinities and their votaries to produce any thing of similar import. "Who hath declared this from ancient time! Who hath told it from that time? Have not I the Lord? And there is no god else besides me, a just God and a Saviour; there is none else beside me. Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done; saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure." What an affecting lesson is afforded to us by the blasted ruins of the temple and palaces of magnificent Babylon! Powerfully do they confirm, and illustrate, and awfully recommend, the instructive language of the apostles of Christ: "All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." FRANCIS ANTON JOSEPH VON SONNENBERG was was born at Münster, in Westphalia, in the year 1780. He may not inappropriately be called the German Henry Kirke White. His early years were marked by the same precocity of genius, and the same lines which Byron laid as tribute upon the tomb of the English, may decribe also the sad and early fate of the German poet: "Unhappy youth! while life was in its spring, And thy young muse first waved her joyous wing, And with equal truth might we add, "Twas thine own genius gave the fatal blow, And helped to plant the wound that laid thee low." The childhood of Sonnenberg gaveevidence of poetic powers yet to be developed. His fancy seemed early to have gained the superiority over the other powers of his mind. His education, which might have restrained or corrected this excessive tendency to throw himself upon the current of his imagination, only confirmed it. He was borne away by the tide of his own feelings and fancies, and early drifted to the fate which awaited him in so untimely an hour. Before the powers of his soul had fully bloomed, they were plucked by the hand of death. Enough however remains of his writings to show that, had his life been spared, he would have risen to occupy a position among the noblest of the German poets. In his tenth year Sonnenberg had gained quite a reputation as a poet in his native city. Even then his local fame placed him above all rivals in the neighborhood of his home. At twelve years of age he laid the plan of an Epic which was afterwards written and published, and which combined, as we should suppose it might, all the faults of a wayward and extravagant conception, bombastic and unnatural diction, and a wild fancy. To this precocious effort he was inspired by the perusal of Klopstock's Messiah. More, probably, to satisfy the wishes of others than to gratify his own taste, he devoted himself to the study of law. This he seems to have pureued but a short time, for we find him in his nineteenth year travelling through Germany, Switzerland, and France. On his return, he seems to have been disgusted with the society around him; he doubtless found it too prosaic; or, if we may judge from some of his poems, too Frenchified-for the old German love of Fatherland was strong in his soul-and he spent some time longer in wandering over every part of Germany, accompanied only by the muse whose society he cultivated. In the neighborhood of Jena, at Drakendorf, he at length fixed his resídence. The influence of friends of a spirit congenial to his own, and who resided there, led him to make this selection. Here he commenced his second Epic, Donatoa, which was published at Halle in 1806, the year after his death. To this work he devoted all the energies of his soul. It absorbed all his thoughts, to the utter neglect of health and exercise. He sacrificed every thing to it, neglecting food and drink, society, recreation, and all the common pleasures of life. The result of such unnatural and excessive effort was soon manifested in the utter prostration of his physical frame. His death was the suicide of Genius. His mental as well as bodily powers became deranged, and in a moment of frenzy he plunged from the lofty window of his dwelling, and lost his life. This occurred Nov. 22, 1805. Three days before his death, he secured from his friend Gruber the promise to take charge of his poetical remains. It is owing to this that several of his minor pieces, which are, some of them, of a high degree of excellence, have been preserved. Enough remains to show that in Sonnenberg Germany had the promise of a second Klopstock; a promise that would doubtless have been fully realized had his poetical powers been spared to a more full and mature development. The circumstances of his age would soon have corrected his excessive idealism. To some extent they had already done it, previously to his death. The conflicts which at the close of the eighteenth century shook the thrones of Europe, awakened in his soul all the German that was born with him. One of his poems represents the Genius of France and the Genius of Germany conferring together, and the proud boasts and threats of the former are met by language which shows that the poet had begun to appreciate the relative position and duties of the German people. His epigrams and satires give evidence also that he was preparing himself to take a place in the real world around him, and sustain himself and his position by earnest effort. It is possible that experience of his own heart may have had something to do with his untimely fate. The following elegy can scarcely have been the work of mere fancy. We seem to see in its flow the pulsations of the heart throwing out the currents of its own life. MILDA-AN ELEGY.' THE firefly glides athwart the elmwood grove; The fairies dance the murmuring stream along; Save from yon hollow trunk, no voices move Where the sad cricket chirps his dying-song. Long-perished joys that to my youth were known Here, where the moonbeams cast their checkering light, The varied wandering fortune I have seen; Here first I saw thee, Milda, while the beams Thy look was noble; fair, divine it showed; Thy cheeks were clothed with spring's young, roselike grace; Thy lips like summer-morning's blushes glowed. In snowy-girdling innocence her way She took along the quiet moonlit grove : The evening star smiled on her like the day, But her eye kindled with a sweeter love. |