earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never any

thing human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image

of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verge 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;

718

The Innocents Abroad