affecting! Some sumptuous edifice of a former age, still standing
in its undecayed strength, has undoubtedly a great command over us, from
the ages that have flowed over it; but the mouldering edifice which
Nature has begun to win to herself, and to dissolve into her own bosom,
is far more touching to the heart, and more awakening to the spirit. It
is beautiful in its decay--not merely because green leaves, and wild
flowers, and creeping mosses soften its rugged frowns, but because they
have sown themselves on the decay of greatness; they are monitors to our
fancy, like the flowers on a grave, of the untroubled rest of the dead.
Battlements riven by the hand of time, and cloistered arches reft and
rent, speak to us of the warfare and of the piety of our ancestors, of
the pride of their might, and the consolations of their sorrow: they
revive dim shadows of departed life, evoked from the land of
forgetfulness; but they touch us more deeply when the brightness which
the sun flings on the broken arches, and the warbling of birds that are
nestled in the chambers of princes, and the moaning of winds through the
crevices of towers, round which the surges of war were shattered and
driven back, lay those phantoms again to rest in their silent bed, and
show us, in the monuments of human life and power, the visible footsteps
of Time and Oblivion coming on in their everlasting and irresistible
career, to sweep down our perishable race, and to reduce all the forms
of our momentary being into the undistinguishable elements of their
original nothing.

What is there below the skies like the place of mighty and departed
cities? the vanishing or vanished capitals of renowned empires? There is
no other such desolation. The solitudes of nature may be wild and drear,
but they are not like the solitude from which human glory is swept away.
The overthrow or decay of mighty human power is, of all thoughts that
can enter the mind, the most overwhelming. The whole imagination is at
once stirred by the prostration of that, round which so many high
associations have been collected for so many ages. Beauty seems born but
to perish, and its fragility is seen and felt to be inherent in it by a
law of its being. But power gives stability, as it were, to human
thought, and we forget our own perishable nature in the spectacle of
some abiding and enduring greatness. Our own little span of years--our
own confined region of space--are lost in the enduranc