The sun upon the following day shining through the windows’ tapestry, awoke me by his reddening beams, and warned me to rise and behold the grandeur at my feet. Throwing the lattice open, I beheld a panorama unequalled in sublimity and beauty by any thing I had ever seen. Berytus stretched away below me, sparkling with shining domes, glistening house tops, and here and there arose some marble monumental pillar, or an obelisk, commemorative of some signal event, which, peeping from their encircling grove, appeared to rest upon its summit like flakes of freshly fallen snow. Beyond the city lay the ocean, with many a sail, but dimly visible upon its heaving bosom; behind me rose, towering and precipitous, eternal Lebanon, bathed in a flood of various lights, like a vestment dyed with many colors, and the pines which crown its heights, spreading their fringy leaves against the clouds, borrowed all their hues. With nature clothed in gladness, and the scented freshness of the morning air, filled with the warbling of birds, you may entertain surprise when I tell you, that my feelings were those of sadness, for I reflected that this great city must, in its turn, as other cities have, either sink into insignificance, or become much diminished in splendor, and its thousands of busy people, with the unerring certainty of the rising sun, be gathered generation after generation, to their fathers, while the hoary mountain at whose base it lay, would through all time raise its head in haughty glory. How vain to boast of immortality, how vain to live solely for ambition’s sake, when the fame of the hero rests upon the mercy of a parchment, or the treacherous reliance of tradition. A convulsion of the earth may overthrow a temple, the pride of centuries, the boast of a nation—a spark consume a city, and time’s wasting finger in the interval of but a few years, destroy the golden record of genius, however perpetuated, so that the celebrity of the orator, and the works of the poet, shall have but a flickering existence, and finally shall perish from the recollection of their countrymen. The morning of our departure being now at hand, we began our journey from Berytus, through Baalbec to Damascus, and as it lay through a rocky region, we knew it would be rough and wearisome, but when we remembered the grandeur of nature, the mountains, valleys, forests, temples, palaces, we should behold, we trusted we would be able to drive away fatigue. Among those who performed the journey with us, were Lactantius, Marcus, and Valerius; also Cornelia, and Placidia, the daughter of Lucius Sergius, and their kinswoman Lucretia.