, was there robbed by them,
and left; a huge stone being placed over the entrance.

What felt the Gallic, traveller,
When far in Arab desert, drear,
He found within the catacomb,
Alive, the terrors of a tomb?
While many a mummy, through the shade,
In hieroglyphic stole arrayed,
Seem'd to uprear the mystic head,
And trace the gloom with ghostly tread;
Thou heard'st him pour the stifled groan,
Horror! his soul was all thy own! ED.

[b] See Hibbert's Philosophy of Apparitions. It is to be regretted, that
Coleridge has never yet gratified the wish he professed to feel, in
the first volume of his Friend, p. 246, to devote an entire work to
the subject of dreams, visions, ghosts, witchcraft, &c; in it we
should have had the satisfaction of tracing the workings of a most
vivid imagination, analyzed by the most discriminating judgment. See
Barrow's sermon on the being of God, proved from supernatural
effects. We need scarcely request the reader to bear in mind, that
Barrow was a mathematician, and one of the most severe of
reasoners.--ED.

CHAP. XXXII.

THEY ENTER THE PYRAMID.

Pekuah descended to the tents, and the rest entered the pyramid: they
passed through the galleries, surveyed the vaults of marble, and
examined the chest, in which the body of the founder is supposed to have
been reposited. They then sat down in one of the most spacious chambers,
to rest awhile before they attempted to return.

"We have now," said Imlac, "gratified our minds with an exact view of
the greatest work of man, except the wall of China.

"Of the wall it is very easy to assign the motive. It secured a wealthy
and timorous nation from the incursions of barbarians, whose
unskilfulness in arts made it easier for them to supply their wants by
rapine than by industry, and who, from time to time, poured in upon the
habitations of peaceful commerce, as vultures descend upon domestick
fowl. Their celerity and fierceness, made the wall necessary, and their
ignorance made it efficacious.

"But, for the pyramids, no reason has ever been given adequate to the
cost and labour of the work. The narrowness of the chambers proves that
it could afford no retreat from enemies, and treasures might have been
reposited, at far less expense, with equal security. It seems to have
been erected only in compliance with that hunger of imagination, which
preys incessantly upon life, and must be al