A pilgrimage to the temples and tombs of Egypt, Nubia, and ...

THE VOCAL MEMNON. 283
the statue of Memnon was originally formed of
one block of stone, and that it had been rent in
two, and the upper portion destroyed by an earth-
quake ; for the piecemeal upper part looks like a
restoration much more than like an original
creation. The other colossus is cut out of one
enormous block of stone, and its proportions and
attitude are precisely similar to those of the
famous Memnon. The appearance of these two
gigantic guardians of the plain of ruins, which
have immoveably maintained their posts amidst
the transmutations of more than three thousand
years, has in it something both awful and sub-
lime. Empires, and dynasties, and races, have
been swept away, as it were, from their feet,
and have vanished "like shadows of the night;"
and century following century has been engulphed
in the great Ocean of Eternity, even as the waves
of the Nile, rolling onward before their eyes,
empty themselves into the sea—and still they
have remained unchanged, like the personifica-
tion of Inexorable Fate glaring with frightful
calm upon the ruined fabric of human happiness
and prosperity. They look like remnants of
another world—the work of a race of beings
wholly different from those that now people the
earth ; they would almost reconcile me to a .be-