Beaufort, Emily Anne: Egyptian sepulchres and Syrian shrines: including some stay in the Lebanon, at Palmyra and in Western Turkey ; in 2 vol. (Band 1) (London, 1862)

78

CHAP. V.

ETERNAL THOUGHT IN IMPERISHABLE STONE.

" With God's elect in every age
And every race — the Athenian sage,
And all those ancients who perceived
And lived the truth they had received,
In old Osirian mystery,
In Bouddha, Balder — holding pure
That Faith through man's self-will obscure,
And selfless ones for Hell decreed
By men, because they lacked a creed."

Hon. Boden Noel.

ABIED skimming through the smoky sky of London,
perching on this steeple or on that, here and there
peering into a window, or picking a few crumbs in one
street or in another, would have an endless tale of
wonder to relate to the mate he left at home in his
country nest; but the town-bred sparrow would not have
much respect for the accuracy with which he described
even the external architecture of the immense city—and
of all that was " underneath the eaves," what would he
know ? Just as much as a traveller, lingering his longest
possible on the green plain of Thebes, may fancy he knows
of even the ruins of that ancient City, whose stones and
walls are laid in desolate heaps upon the ground, whose
statues and obelisks are now shapeless masses, and
whose history is looked upon, but not read, by eyes that
are unwillingly blinded by ignorance. The devotion