human story.

Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America;
old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages
to arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins
beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the
fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and his disciples walked
the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were
vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes.

This is pure poetry. He had never touched so high a strain before,
but he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing
mastery and confidence. In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy
Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional
crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain,
the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx. We cannot forego a paragraph or
two of that word-picture:

After 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