years of waiting it was before me at last. The great face was
so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not
of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as
never anything 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 everything
of the present, and far into the past.... It was thinking of the
wars of the 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 . . . .

The Sphinx 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 we shall feel when
we shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.

Then that closing word of Egypt. He elaborated it for the book, and did
not improve it. Let us preserve here its original form.

We are glad to have seen Egypt. We are glad to have seen that old
land which taught Greece her letters--and through Greece, Rome--and
through Rome, the world--that venerable cradle of culture and
refinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children of
Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages--those
Children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad
shortcomings we still excuse--not because they were savages, but
because they were the chosen savages of God.

The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame. They presented
the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian travel ever written
--one that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long as human
nature remains unchanged. From beginning to end the tale is rarely,
reverently told. Its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in the
voluminous literature of that solemn land:

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of
a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energ