ocean
shores of Greece, would have been absurd. The Grecian artists were
deterred by their unerring instincts from the attempt. They accordingly
built beautiful temples, whose white and symmetrical colonnades adorned
the declivities, or crowned the summits of the hills. They sculptured
statues, to be placed on pedestals in groves and gardens; they
constructed fountains; they raised bridges and aqueducts on long ranges
of arches and piers; and the summits of ragged rocks crystallized, as it
were, under their hands into towers, battlements, and walls. In Egypt,
on the other hand, where the country itself was a level and unvarying
plain, the architecture took forms of prodigious magnitude, of lofty
elevation, and of vast extent. There were ranges of enormous columns,
colossal statues, towering obelisks, and pyramids rising like mountains
from the verdure of the plain. Thus, while nature gave to the country
its elements of beauty, man completed the landscape by adding to it the
grand and the sublime.

The shape and proportions of Egypt would be represented by a green
ribbon an inch wide and a yard long, lying upon the ground in a
serpentine form; and to complete the model, we might imagine a silver
filament passing along the center of the green to denote the Nile. The
real valley of verdure, however, is not of uniform breadth, like the
ribbon so representing it, but widens as it approaches the sea, as if
there had been originally a gulf or estuary there, which the sediment
from the river had filled.

In fact, the rich and fertile plain which the alluvial deposits of the
Nile have formed, has been protruded for some distance into the sea, and
the stream divides itself into three great branches about a hundred
miles from its mouth, two outermost of which, with the sea-coast in
front, inclose a vast triangle, which was called the Delta, from the
Greek letter _delta_, (Greek: D), which is of a triangular form. In
ascending the river beyond the Delta, the fertile plain, at first
twenty-five or thirty miles wide, grows gradually narrower, as the
ranges of barren hills and tracts of sandy deserts on either hand draw
nearer and nearer to the river. Thus the country consists of two long
lines of rich and fertile intervals, one on each side of the stream. In
the time of Xerxes the whole extent was densely populated, every little
elevation of the land being covered with a village or a town. The
inhabitants tilled the land, raising