Behold ! where pleasure smiled ;
What now remains ? — the memory
Of senselessness and shame —
What is immortal there ? 115
Nothing — it stands to tell
A melancholy tale, to give
An awful warning : soon
Oblivion will steal silently
The remnant of its fame. 120
Monarchs and conquerors there
Proud o'er prostrate millions trod —
The earthquakes of the human race ;
Like them, forgotten when the ruin
That marks their shock is past.
' Beside the eternal Nile, 126
The Pyramids have risen.
Nile shall pursue his changeless way :
Those Pyramids shall fall ;
Yea ! not a stone shall stand to tell
The spot whereon they stood ! 1 3 1
Their very site shall be forgotten,
As is their builder's name !
' Behold yon sterile spot ;
Where now the wandering Arab's
tent 135
Flaps in the desert-blast.
There once old Salem's haughty fane
Reared high to Heaven its thousand
golden domes,
And in the blushing face of day
Exposed its shameful glory. 1 40
Oh ! many a widow, many an orphan
cursed
The building of that fane ; and many
a father,
Worn out with toil and slavery,
implored
The poor man's God to sweep it from
the earth, 144
And spare his children the detested task
Of piling stone on stone, and poisoning
The choicest days of life,
To soothe a dotard's vanity.
There an inhuman and uncultured race
Howled hideous praises to their
Demon-God ; 1 50
They rushed to war, tore from the
mother's womb
The unborn child, — old age and
infancy
Promiscuous perished ; their vic-
torious arms
Left not a soul to breathe. Oh ! they
were fiends :
But what was he who taught them
that the God 155
Of nature and benevolence hath given
A special sanction to the trade of
blood ?
His name and theirs are fading, and
the tales
Of this barbarian nation, which im-
posture
Recites till terror credits, are pursu-
ing 160
Itself into forgetfulness.
' Where Athens, Rome, and Sparta
stood,
There is a moral desert now :
The mean and miserable huts,
The yet more wretched palaces, 1 65
Contrasted with those ancient
fanes,
Now crumbling to oblivion ;
The long and lonely colonnades,
Through which the ghost of Free-
dom stalks,
Seem like a well-known tune,
Which in some dear scene we have
loved to hear, 171
Remembered now in sadness.
But, oh ! how much more
changed,
How gloomier is the contrast
Of human nature there ! 175
Where Socrates expired, a tyrant's
slave,
A coward and a fool, spreads death
around —
Then, shuddering, meets his
own.
Where Cicero and Antoninus lived,
A cowled and hypocritical monk 1 80
Prays, curses and deceives.
Spirit, ten thousand years
Have scarcely passed away,
Since, in the waste where now the
savage drinks
His enemy's blood, and aping Europe's
I sons, 185
