Hermes Trismegistus

As Seleucus narrates, Hermes describes the principles that rank as wholes in two myriads of books; or, as we are informed by Manetho, he perfectly unfolded these principles in three myriads six thousand five hundred and twenty-five volumes. . . .         . . . Our ancestors dedicated the inventions of    their wisdom to this deity, inscribing all their own writings with the name of Hermes.--IAMBLICUS.     Still through Egypt's desert places         Flows the lordly Nile,     From its banks the great stone faces         Gaze with patient smile.     Still the pyramids imperious         Pierce the cloudless skies,     And the Sphinx stares with mysterious,         Solemn, stony eyes.     But where are the old Egyptian         Demi-gods and kings?     Nothing left but an inscription         Graven on stones and rings.     Where are Helios and Hephaestus,         Gods of eldest eld?     Where is Hermes Trismegistus,         Who their secrets held?     Where are now the many hundred         Thousand books he wrote?     By the Thaumaturgists plundered,         Lost in lands remote;     In oblivion sunk forever,         As when o'er the land     Blows a storm-wind, in the river          Sinks the scattered sand.     Something unsubstantial, ghostly,         Seems this Theurgist,     In deep meditation mostly         Wrapped, as in a mist.     Vague, phantasmal, and unreal         To our thought he seems,     Walking in a world ideal,         In a land of dreams.     Was he one, or many, merging         Name and fame in one,     Like a stream, to which, converging         Many streamlets run?     Till, with gathered power proceeding,         Ampler sweep it takes,     Downward the sweet waters leading         From unnumbered lakes.     By the Nile I see him wandering,         Pausing now and then,     On the mystic union pondering         Between gods and men;     Half believing, wholly feeling,         With supreme delight,     How the gods, themselves concealing,         Lift men to their height.     Or in Thebes, the hundred-gated,         In the thoroughfare     Breathing, as if consecrated,         A diviner air;     And amid discordant noises,         In the jostling throng,     Hearing far, celestial voices         Of Olympian song.     Who shall call his dreams fallacious?         Who has searched or sought     All the unexplored and spacious         Universe of thought?     Who, in his own skill confiding,          Shall with rule and line     Mark the border-land dividing         Human and divine?     Trismegistus! three times greatest!         How thy name sublime     Has descended to this latest         Progeny of time!     Happy they whose written pages         Perish with their lives,     If amid the crumbling ages         Still their name survives!     Thine, O priest of Egypt, lately         Found I in the vast,     Weed-encumbered sombre, stately,         Grave-yard of the Past;     And a presence moved before me         On that gloomy shore,     As a waft of wind, that o'er me         Breathed, and was no more.