which flows out of
the unfathomable darkness as 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 o