House Beautiful by Charlotte Maria Tucker

IT is much more than three thousand years since the mighty wall of waters fell crashing and thundering on Pharaoh and his host; since over his chariots and his horsemen swept the huge billows of the sea. We will not, however, look on his chariot as drawn from the watery waste, where it lay perhaps imbedded in coral, with the dank sea-weeds wrapped around it, pierced by the ship-worm, with the finny inhabitants of the deep gliding under the decaying axle, or over the broken wheel. We will survey Pharaoh's chariot in all its pomp of colour and gilding; as it was when the tyrant mounted it to pursue after Israel, a chariot meet for one of the mightiest of monarchs, one of the proudest of men. We will look on it as it was when powerful and fiery horses bore it rapidly onward, under the guidance of the skilful charioteer, and armed multitudes followed on its track.

What stern and terrible emotions must have darkened the countenance of Pharaoh as he set his foot on that chariot, which was to bear him on, as he deemed, to his revenge! He was the tyrant from whom the captives were escaping; the lion from whom his prey had been torn; the bereaved father whose bitterness of anguish was turned into thirst for vengeance. To Pharaoh, every forward bound of his horses, every revolution of those massive wheels, seemed to brine him nearer to what he most eagerly desired: "The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them!"