de and beauty--never dreaming
that in a single day the plowshare and the hundred-handed monster
called industry can tear its bosom to rob it of its treasures; you are
growing up full of trust and presumption, not foreseeing your coming
life, which will drag you down under the weight of its errors,
disfigure you with the false colors of its promises. Wait, wait a few
years, and you too will say, 'All is passing away!'"

"No, all is not passing away!" said Stenio. "Look at the sun, and the
earth, and the beautiful sky, and these green hills; and even that
ice, winter's fragile edifice, which has withstood the rays of summer
for centuries. Even so man's frail power will prevail! What matters
the fall of a few generations? Do you weep for so slight a thing,
Lelia? Do you deem it possible a single idea can die in the universe?
Will not that imperishable inheritance be found intact in the dust of
our extinct races, just as the inspirations of art and the discoveries
of science arise alive each day from the ashes of Pompeii or the tombs
of Memphis? Oh, what a great and striking proof of intellectual
immortality! Deep mysteries had been lost in the night of time; the
world had forgotten its age, and thinking itself still young, was
alarmed at feeling itself so old. It said as you do, Lelia: 'I am
about to end, for I am growing weak, and I was born but a few days
ago! How few I shall need for dying, since so few were needed for
living!' But one day human corpses were exhumed from the bosom of
Egypt--Egypt that had lived out its period of civilization, and has
just lived its period of barbarism! Egypt, where the ancient light,
lost so long, is being rekindled, and a rested and rejuvenated Egypt
may perhaps soon come and establish herself upon the extinguished
torch of our own. Egypt, the living image of her mummies sleeping
under the dust of ages, and now awaking to the broad daylight of
science in order to reveal the age of the old world to the new! Is
this not solemn and terrible, Lelia? Within the dried-up entrails of a
human corpse the inquisitive glance of our century discovered the
papyrus, that mysterious and sacred monument of man's eternal
power--the still dark but incontrovertible witness of the imposing
duration of creation. Our eager hand unrolls those perfumed bandages,
those frail and indissoluble shrouds at which destruction stopt short.
These bandages that once enfolded a corpse, these manuscripts that
have reste