Rensselaer Union, Volume 1, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 September 1869 — A Sober Meditation by Mark Twain. [ARTICLE]

A Sober Meditation by Mark Twain.

In Mark Twain’s new volume of reminiscences of loreign travels he for once abandons his persistent habit of nuiking fun of everything, and thus discourses of the Egyptian Sphynx : After years of waiting, it was before me, at last The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was, a dignity not ot earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as nover anything human wore. It was stono, but it seemed, sentient. I fever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It.was looking toward the verge of the <’laijtlscape, yet looking at nothihg—nothing but ilistan.ee and vacancy. -It was looking ever and beyond everything of the present, and far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of time—over lines of century waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and nearer together, and blended at last into one unbroken tide, away toward the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking, of the wars of departed* ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed ; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted ; of the joy anti sorrow,, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow-revolving years. It was the type of an attribute of man—of a faculty of his heart and brain. ’R; fen? Memory—Retrospection— wrought into visible, tangible form. All who know what pathos is in memories of days that are accomplished and facts that have vanished—albeit only a trifling score of years gone by—will have some appreciation of the pathos that dwells in these grave eyes that look so steadfastly back upon the things they knew before history wife bJFn —before t radition had being—things Stint were, and forms that moved, in a vague area which even poetry and romance scarce knew of—and passed one by one away, and left the stony dreamer solitary in the midst of a strange new age and uncomprehended scenes. .;» ; JJThe sphynx is grand in italoneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude $ |t hrjpjprcitfive in the mystery that hangs over its story. And there is that j the overshadowing majesty of this eternjl figure of stone, with its accusing inemqfynf tlje deeds of all ages, which reveals to one something of what he shall feel when he shall stand at last in the awful presence of God. . .