e of
the landscape, yet looking at nothing--nothing but distance and vacancy.
It was looking over and beyond every thing of the present, and far into
the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of Time--over lines of
century-waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and
nearer together, and blended at last into one unbroken tide, away toward
the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking of the wars of departed
ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations
whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose
annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the
grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow revolving years. It was the
type of an attribute of man--of a faculty of his heart and brain. It was
MEMORY--RETROSPECTION--wrought into visible, tangible form. All who know
what pathos there is in memories of days that are accomplished and faces
that have vanished--albeit only a trifling score of years gone by--will
have some appreciation of the pathos that dwells in these grave eyes that
look so steadfastly back upon the things they knew before History was
born--before Tradition had being--things that were, and forms that moved,
in a vague era which even Poetry and Romance scarce know of--and passed
one by one away and left the stony dreamer solitary in the midst of a
strange new age, and uncomprehended scenes.

The Sphynx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude;
it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story. And there is
that in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with
its accusing memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveals to one
something of what he shall feel when he shall stand at last in the awful
presence of God.

There are some things which, for the credit of America, should be left
unsaid, perhaps; but these very things happen sometimes to be the very
things which, for the real benefit of Americans, ought to have prominent
notice. While we stood looking, a wart, or an excrescence of some kind,
appeared on the jaw of the Sphynx. We heard the familiar clink of a
hammer, and understood the case at once. One of our well meaning
reptiles--I mean relic-hunters--had crawled up there and was trying to
break a "specimen" from the face of this the most majestic creation the
hand of man has wrought. But the great image contemplated the dead ages
as calmly as ever, unconscious of