Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/185

 of Moses, if not to the inspiration of God. Hence they who deny the Divine origin of the Hebrew Polity, bear the highest testimony to the splendor of that intellect which created it. If all was the product of one mind, it is the most illustrious instance in history of the power of a great spirit to impress itself on the race. The name of Moses stands alone, as the greatest of antiquity, and the Hebrew law remains as its most wonderful monument.

In harmony with the solitary grandeur of such a life, was the manner of death — alone and on a mountain top. Moses' work was done. Through forty years of desert wandering, he had led the children of Israel to the borders of the Promised Land. Yet that land he was not permitted to enter; it was for others to reap the fruit of his labor. He had nothing more to do but to die. For this he went up into a mountain, from which he saw the sun setting over the Western hills, and knew that the time for his own sun to set, had come. There he died, and "no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day."

But what though his place of burial be unknown, his "sceptred spirit" still rules kingdoms and nations that were not born till centuries and millenniums after his dust had mingled and been lost in the boundless soil of Asia. "His line has gone out through all the earth, and his words to the end of the world." His laws have been translated into all the languages of men, and their spirit and influence have affected the legislation of all civilized countries. Thus the empire of the dead extends over the living, and words spoken on the desert more than three thousand -ears ago, which seemed to die away upon the hollow wind, are caught up and passed on from age to age, and from one hemisphere to another, by

 Those airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses."