the great river streams from sources even
as yet but imperfectly explored.

I have thought a good deal about Egypt, lately, with reference to our
historical monuments. How did the great unknown mastery who fixed the
two leading forms of their monumental records arrive at those admirable
and eternal types, the pyramid and the obelisk? How did they get their
model of the pyramid?

Here is an hour-glass, not inappropriately filled with sand from the
great Egyptian desert. I turn it, and watch the sand as it accumulates
in the lower half of the glass. How symmetrically, how beautifully,
how inevitably, the little particles pile up the cone, which is ever
building and unbuilding itself, always aiming at the stability which is
found only at a certain fixed angle! The Egyptian children playing in
the sand must have noticed this as they let the grains fall from their
hands, and the sloping sides of the miniature pyramid must have been
among the familiar sights to the little boys and girls for whom the sand
furnished their earliest playthings. Nature taught her children through
the working of the laws of gravitation how to build so that her forces
should act in harmony with art, to preserve the integrity of a structure
meant to reach a far-off posterity. The pyramid is only the cone in
which Nature arranges her heaped and sliding fragments; the cone
with flattened Surfaces, as it is prefigured in certain well-known
crystalline forms. The obelisk is from another of Nature's patterns; it
is only a gigantic acicular crystal.

The Egyptians knew what a monument should be, simple, noble, durable.
It seems to me that we Americans might take a lesson from those early
architects. Our cemeteries are crowded with monuments which are very
far from simple, anything but noble, and stand a small chance of being
permanent. The pyramid is rarely seen, perhaps because it takes up so
much room; and when built on a small scale seems insignificant as we
think of it, dwarfed by the vast structures of antiquity. The obelisk is
very common, and when in just proportions and of respectable dimensions
is unobjectionable.

But the gigantic obelisks like that on Bunker Hill, and especially
the Washington monument at the national capital, are open to critical
animadversion. Let us contrast the last mentioned of these great piles
with the obelisk as the Egyptian conceived and executed it. The new
Pharaoh ordered a memorial of some important personage or