erected. All around
that platform were a series of lesser temples--or chapels, as
we should call them--decorated with niches, admirably engraved,
and loaded with sculptured ornaments to a degree that appeared
excessive to those who had seen the severe simplicity of the
Parthenon or the Coliseum. But how prodigious the accumulation
of architectural riches in the middle of an eastern desert!
Combine in imagination the Temple of Jupiter Stator and the
Coliseum at Rome, of Jupiter Olympius and the Acropolis at
Athens, and you will yet fall short of that marvellous
assemblage of admirable edifices and sculptures. Many of the
temples rest on columns seventy feet in height, and seven feet
in diameter, yet composed only of two or three blocks of stone,
so perfectly joined together that to this day you can barely
discern the lines of their junction. Silence is the only
language which befits man when words are inadequate to convey
his impressions. We remained mute with admiration, gazing on
the eternal ruins.

"The shades of night overtook us while we yet rested in
amazement at the scene by which we were surrounded. One by one
they enveloped the columns in their obscurity, and added a
mystery the more to that magical and mysterious work of time
and man. We appeared, as compared with the gigantic mass and
long duration of these monuments, as the swallows which nestle
a season in the crevices of the capitals, without knowing by
whom, or for whom, they have been constructed. The thoughts,
the wishes, which moved these masses, are to us unknown. The
dust of marble which we tread beneath our feet knows more of it
than we do, but it cannot tell us what it has seen; and in a
few ages the generations which shall come in their turn to
visit our monuments, will ask, in like manner, wherefore we
have built and engraved. The works of man survive his thought.
Movement is the law of the human mind; the definite is the
dream of his pride and his ignorance. God is a limit which
appears ever to recede as humanity approaches him: we are ever
advancing, and never arrive. This great Divine Figure which man
from his infancy is ever striving to reach, and to imprison in
his structures raised by hands, for ever enlarges and expands;
it outsteps the narrow limits o