A Thought of the Nile

By Leigh Hunt 1784–1859 Leigh Hunt

It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,

Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream,

And times and things, as in that vision, seem

Keeping along it their eternal stands,—

Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands

That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme

Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,

The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.

Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,

As of a world left empty of its throng,

And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,

And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along

Twixt villages, and think how we shall take

Our own calm journey on for human sake.

Biography

Leigh Hunt was a central figure of the Romantic movement in England, but he was not, as he wished to be and knew he was not, one of its great poets. However, he produced, during the first sixty years of the nineteenth century, a large body of poetry in a variety of forms: narrative poems, satires, poetic dramas, odes, epistles, sonnets, short lyrics, and translations from Greek, Roman, Italian, and French poems. His vivid . . .

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