In my youth it made upon me an indelible impression. Through intervening years, filled with many new impressions, many wanderings, many visions of beauty in other lands, that retired, painted chamber had not faded from my mind--or shall I say from my heart? There had seemed to me within it something that was ineffable, as in a lyric of Shelley’s there is something that is ineffable, or in certain pictures of Boecklin, such as “The Villa by the Sea.” And when at last, almost afraid and hesitating, I came into it once more, I found in it again the strange spell of old enchantment. It seems as if this chamber had been imagined by a poet, who had set it in the center of the temple of his dream. It is such a spontaneous chamber that one can scarcely imagine it more than a day and a night in the building. Yet in detail it is lovely; it is finished and strangely mighty; it is a lyric in stone, the most poetical chamber, perhaps, in the whole of Egypt. For Philæ I count in Egypt, though really it is in Nubia. One who has not seen Philæ may perhaps wonder how a tall chamber of solid stone, containing heavy and soaring columns, can be like a lyric of Shelley’s, can be exquisitely spontaneous, and yet hold a something of mystery that makes one tread softly in it, and fear to disturb within it some lovely sleeper of Nubia, some Princess of the Nile. He must continue to wonder. To describe this chamber calmly, as I might, for instance, describe the temple of Derr, would be simply to destroy it. For things ineffable cannot be fully explained, or not be fully felt by those the twilight of whose dreams is fitted to mingle with their twilight. They who are meant to love with ardor _se passionnent pour la passion_. And they who are meant to take and to keep the spirit of a dream, whether it be hidden in a poem, or held in the cup of a flower, or enfolded in [Illustration: From a photograph by James S. Lee FORE-COURT OF THE TEMPLE OF ISIS AND “PHARAOH’S BED.” PHILÆ] arms of stone, will surely never miss it, even though they can hear roaring loudly above its elfin voice the cry of directed waters rushing down to Upper Egypt. How can one disentangle from their tapestry web the different threads of a spell? And even if one could, if one could hold them up, and explain, “The cause of the spell is that this comes in contact with this, and that this, which I show you, blends with, fades into, this,” how could it advantage any one? Nothing would be made clearer, nothing be really explained. The ineffable is, and must ever remain, something remote and mysterious.