s the mighty of the earth; Roman
Emperors in the past came to appease the wrath of its gods, a German
Emperor to-day comes to pilfer its temples. For the Acropolis in
the poplar grove is a mine of ruins. The porphyry pillars, the
statues, the tablets, the exquisite friezes, the palimpsests, the
bas-reliefs,--Time and the Turks have spared a few of these. And when
the German Emperor came, Abd'ul-Hamid blinked, and the Berlin Museum
is now the richer for it.

Of the Temple of Jupiter, however, only six standing columns remain;
of the Temple of Bacchus only the god and the Bacchantes are missing.
And why was the one destroyed, the other preserved, only the six
columns, had they a tongue, could tell. Indeed, how many blustering
vandals have _they_ conquered, how many savage attacks have they
resisted, what wonders and what orgies have they beheld! These six
giants of antiquity, looking over Anti-Lebanon in the East, and
down upon the meandering Leontes in the South, and across the
Syrian steppes in the North, still hold their own against Time and the
Elements. They are the dominating feature of the ruins; they tower
above them as the Acropolis towers above the surrounding poplars. And
around their base, and through the fissures, flows the perennial
grace of the seasons. The sun pays tribute to them in gold; the rain,
in mosses and ferns; the Spring, in lupine flowers. And the
swallows, nesting in the portico of the Temple of Bacchus, above
the curious frieze of egg-decoration,--as curious, too, _their_ art of
egg-making,--pour around the colossal columns their silvery notes.
Surely, these swallows and ferns and lupine flowers are more
ancient than the Acropolis. And the marvels of extinct nations can
not hold a candle to the marvels of Nature.

Here, under the decaying beauty of Roman art, lies buried the
monumental boldness of the Phoenicians, or of a race of giants whose
extinction even Homer deplores, and whose name even the Phoenicians
could not decipher. For might they not, too, have stood here
wondering, guessing, even as we moderns guess and wonder? Might not
the Phoenicians have asked the same questions that we ask to-day: Who
were the builders? and with what tools? In one of the walls of the
Acropolis are stones which a hundred bricklayers can not raise an inch
from the ground; and among the ruins of the Temple of Zeus are
porphyry pillars, monoliths, which fifty horses could barely move, and
the quarry of which