. These verses she composed in the Aeolian dialect, named
herself as their writer and informed the readers--among whom she included
Pontius--that she was descended from a house no less noble than that of
King Antiochus.

The gigantic structures on each bank of the Nile fully equalled Hadrian's
expectations, though they had suffered so much injury from earthquakes
and sieges, and the impoverished priesthood of Thebes were no longer in a
position to provide for their preservation even, much less for their
restoration. Balbilla accompanied Caesar on a visit to the sanctuary of
Ammon, on the eastern shore of the Nile. In the great hall, the most vast
and lofty pillared hall in the world, her impressionable soul felt a
peculiar exaltation, and as the Emperor observed how, with a heightened
color she now gazed upward, and then again, leaning against a towering
column, looked at the scene around her, he asked her what she felt,
standing in this really worthy abode of the gods.

"One thing--above all things one thing!" cried the girl. "That
architecture is the sublimest of the arts! This temple is to me like some
grand epode, and the poet who composed it conceived it not in feeble
words but formed it out of almost immovable masses. Thousands of parts
are here combined to form a whole, and each is welded with the rest into
beautiful harmony and helps to give expression to the stupendous idea
which existed in the brain of the builder of this hall. What other art is
gifted with the power of creating a work so imperishable and so far
transcending all ordinary standards?"

"A poetess crowning the architect with laurels!" exclaimed the Emperor.
"But is not the poet's realm the infinite, and can the architect ever get
beyond the finite and the limited?"

"Then is the nature of the divinity a measurable unit?" asked Balbilla.
"No, it is not; and yet this hall gives one the impression that the very
divinity might find space in it to dwell in."

"Because it owes it existence to a master-mind, which while it conceived
it stood on the boundary line of eternity. But do you think this temple
will outlast the poems of Homer?"

"No; but the memory of it will no more fade away that of the wrath of
Achilles or the wanderings of the experienced Odysseus."

"It is a pity that our friend Pontius cannot hear you," said Hadrian. "He
has completed the plans for a work which is destined to outlive me and
him and all of us.

"I mean my own tomb