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(From Ruins of Many Lands)
LO! towards the west, where skies are blue and clear, | |
| Their bald, dark heads what giant structures rear? | |
| High o’er the Nile, and Gizeh’s waste of sand, | |
| They look around, dread guardians of the land. | |
| Stupendous works of Mizraim’s early kings! | 5 |
| Where Time hath dropped his scythe and furled his wings, | |
| The hoary god for ages standing by, | |
| Watching their unchanged summits pierce the sky, | |
| As nearer Gizeh’s wondrous piles we draw, | |
| What stirs within us?—sadness blent with awe: | 10 |
| To gaze above, their massy outlines trace, | |
| To lean, a less than pygmy, at their base; | |
| To muse on that vast crowd, in other years | |
| Worn with their toil, and weeping slavery’s tears, | |
| That one man’s mortal frame might brave decay, | 15 |
| One tyrant’s memory should not pass away. | |
| How fills the soul with thoughts too deep for words! | |
| How dark a scene the pictured past affords! | |
| But while we mourn the follies of our kind, | |
| How glorious seems all-conquering, daring mind! | 20 |
| These piles at once grand, matchless, and sublime, | |
| Yet proofs of darkness, monuments of crime? | |
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| O’er Libya’s hills the Day-god sinks once more, | |
| Brightly as when their crowns the Pharaohs wore; | |
| Sweet, too, as then, red-mantled Evening throws | 25 |
| O’er Egypt’s vale the spell of rich repose; | |
| Soft glides and dimples ’neath the sunset smile | |
| The stream of ruins, ancient, storied Nile: | |
| On painted tomb, and crumbling city’s site, | |
| Falls, like a shower of gold, the mellow light. | 30 |
| But brightest here the farewell splendors beam; | |
| From pile to pile the lines of glory stream. | |
| Up from the desert shoot the quivering rays; | |
| No cloud, no mist, relieves that living blaze. | |
| The horizon burns like some vast funeral pyre; | 35 |
| Each towering pyramid seems capped with fire. | |
| But brief that glory,—one by one away | |
| Fade the red beams; now softer colors play, | |
| Pale rose-hues quivering down each structure’s side, | |
| Till deepening shadows veil their pomp and pride. * * * * * | 40 |
| The pyramids, the tombs,—Death’s Stygian bowers, | |
| Ungraced by yews, unbeautified by flowers, | |
| That crowd the desert sands where, race on race, | |
| Men toiled, laughed, wept, then made their resting-place. | |
| The sphinx, like some vast thing of monstrous birth, | 45 |
| Begot by mountains of the laboring earth, | |
| Or darkly heaved from Pluto’s realms below, | |
| Save that too sweet those Ethiop features glow, | |
| Too sadly calm, majestic, and benign, | |
| To image aught but attributes divine. | 50 |
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