Then he answered, rising slowly to that aged stranger’s knee,—­
  “Thou beholdest Abdel-Hassan!  They were mine, and I am he!”

  Wondering, stood they all around him, and a reverent silence kept,
  While, amidst them, Abdel-Hassan lifted up his voice and wept.

  Joy and grief, and faith and triumph, mingled in his flowing tears;
  Refluent on his patient spirit rolled the tide of sixty years.

  As the past and present blended, lo! his larger vision saw,
  In his own life’s compensation, Nature’s universal law.

  “God is good, O reverend stranger!  He hath taught me of His ways,
  By this great and crowning lesson, in the evening of my days.

  “Keep the treasure,—­I have plenty,—­and am richer that I see
  Life ascend, through change and evil, to that perfect life to be,—­

  “In each woe a blessing folded, from all loss a greater gain,
  Joy and hope from fear and sorrow, rest and peace from toil and pain.

  “God is great!  His name is mighty!  He is victor in the strife! 
  For He bringeth Good from Evil, and from Death commandeth Life!”

ABOUT SPIRES.

When the children of Shem said one to another at Babel,—­“Go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top shall reach unto heaven,” they typified a remarkable trait of the human mind,—­a desire for a tangible and material exponent of itself in its most heroic moods.  In the earlier ages of the world, when humanity, as it were, was becoming conscious of itself and its godlike energies, it seems as if this desire could find no nobler expression than in towers.  The same spirit of enterprise which in our own day stretches forth inquiring hands into unexplored realms of physical and intellectual being, and acknowledges in the spoils of such search its noblest and proudest attainments, in more primeval times appears to have been content with the actual and visible invasion of high building into that sky which to them was the great type of the unknown and mysterious.

The birth of these structures was not of the practical necessities of life, but of that fond desire of the soul which has ever haunted mankind with intimations of immortality.  Towers thus became the boldest imaginable symbols of energy and power.  And when, in the course of time, they became exigencies of society, and familiarized by the idea of usefulness, even then they could not but be recognized as expressions of the more heroic elements of human nature.

Founded in superabundant massiveness, and built in prodigality of strength, the tower seems to defy the elements and to outlive tradition.  Old age restores it to more than its primeval significance; and when humbler erections have passed away and crumbled in ruins, it appears once more to rise above the customary uses of men, and to become a companion for tempests and clouds.  Dismantled, deserted, and bearing,