DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.5073#0067
56
ABOU SIMBIL.
gigantic size could express such grace, and benevolence,
so sweetly and grandly mingled; but here, in reality,
one felt in one's heart that Kameses— the glory of
ancient Egypt's many glories, and the terror of the then
known world — must have reigned over a people who
loved him, as well as over slaves who feared him.
Then we turned to the mountains, now deep in violet
shades against the Eastern sky, which we had seen from
the inside of the Temple, feeling that these, at least,
had been beyond the power of man to change; and yet,
strange to say, they seemed to have come within reach
of a hand's grasp, as it were, across the almost im-
measurable gulf between us and the thousands of cen-
turies when these figures were fashioned by men's
hands; strange to feel how Nature came close home to
one's heart as man seemed fading away in such dim
distance; how the
" sweet and potent voice" —
from
"within the sold itself" * —
answered back the whisper from nature's grandest
works, and the inward life of man and of Nature met
together in the same Grod-given thought; strange to
recognise the links of that immortal chain which bound
up the spiritual life of Nature, with the thoughts of
those whose works of the Past were living still in the
Present, — in those old Egyptians and in the children of
the new West, — children of the same Father, with
thoughts alike eternal in both.
We had hoped to have re-entered the temple in the
afternoon, but we suffered so much from the effects of
the vitiated air of the interior all the rest of the day,
that we were compelled very reluctantly to give it up.
* Coleridge.
ABOU SIMBIL.
gigantic size could express such grace, and benevolence,
so sweetly and grandly mingled; but here, in reality,
one felt in one's heart that Kameses— the glory of
ancient Egypt's many glories, and the terror of the then
known world — must have reigned over a people who
loved him, as well as over slaves who feared him.
Then we turned to the mountains, now deep in violet
shades against the Eastern sky, which we had seen from
the inside of the Temple, feeling that these, at least,
had been beyond the power of man to change; and yet,
strange to say, they seemed to have come within reach
of a hand's grasp, as it were, across the almost im-
measurable gulf between us and the thousands of cen-
turies when these figures were fashioned by men's
hands; strange to feel how Nature came close home to
one's heart as man seemed fading away in such dim
distance; how the
" sweet and potent voice" —
from
"within the sold itself" * —
answered back the whisper from nature's grandest
works, and the inward life of man and of Nature met
together in the same Grod-given thought; strange to
recognise the links of that immortal chain which bound
up the spiritual life of Nature, with the thoughts of
those whose works of the Past were living still in the
Present, — in those old Egyptians and in the children of
the new West, — children of the same Father, with
thoughts alike eternal in both.
We had hoped to have re-entered the temple in the
afternoon, but we suffered so much from the effects of
the vitiated air of the interior all the rest of the day,
that we were compelled very reluctantly to give it up.
* Coleridge.