I sat in
the outer courts while some mysterious affairs were being transacted
in the inner rooms of state.
Then we drove to the Louvre, and visited the remains from Nineveh.
They are fewer in number than those in the British Museum, which I
have not yet seen. But the pair of human-headed, winged bulls are said
to be equal in size to any.
I was very much impressed, not only by the solemn grandeur of the
thought that thirty centuries were looking down upon me out of those
stony eyes, but by what I have never seen noticed, the magnificent
phrenological development of the heads. The brow is absolutely
prodigious--broad, high, projecting, massive. It is the brow of a
divinity indeed, or of a cherub, which I am persuaded is the true
designation of these creatures. They are to me but the earliest known
attempts to preserve the cherubim that formed the fiery portals of the
Eden temple until quenched in the Purges of the deluge.
Out of those eyes of serene, benign, profound reflection, therefore,
not thirty, but sixty centuries look down upon me. I seem to be
standing at those mysterious Eden gates, where Adam and Eve first
guided the worship of a world, amid the sad, yet sublime symbols of a
previous existence in heavenly realms.
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