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. Besides that I intend him to ere