"Ruins," in the impressive language of Alger, "symbolize the wishes and fate of man; the weakness of his works, the fleetingness of his existence. Who can visit Thebes, in whose crowded crypts, as he enters, a flight of bats chokes him with the dust of disintegrating priests and kings; see the sheep nibbling herbage between the fallen cromlechs of Stonehenge; or confront a dilapidated stronghold of the Middle Ages, where the fox looks out of the window and the thistle nods on the wall, without thinking of these things? They feelingly persuade him what he is.... Tyre was situated of old at the entry of the sea, the beautiful mistress of the earth, haughty in her purple garments, the tiara of commerce on her brow. Now the dust has been scraped from her till she has become a blistered rock, whereon the solitary fisher spreads his nets. A few tattered huts stand among shapeless masses of masonry where glorious Carthage stood; the homes of a few husbandmen where voluptuous Corinth once lifted her splendid array of marble palaces and golden towers. Many a nation, proud and populous in the elder days of history, like Elephanta, or Memphis, is now merely a tomb and a shadowy name. Pompeii and Herculaneum are empty sepulchres, which that fatal flight before the storm of ashes and lava cheated of their occupants; the traveler sees poppies blooming in the streets where chariots once flashed.... Tigers foray in the palace yards of Persepolis, and camels browse in Babylon on the site of Belshazzar's throne; at Baalbec, lizards overrun the altars of the Temple of the Sun, and in the sculptured friezes, here the nests of obscene birds, there the webs of spiders."