The effect on the imagination of Mr. Addison appears to have been equally lively:—“At the end of the sandy plain,” says he, “the eye rests upon the lofty columns of the Temple of the Sun, encompassed by a dark elevated mass of ruined buildings; and beyond, all around, and right and left towards the Euphrates, as far as the eye can reach, extends the vast level naked flat of the great desert, over which the eye runs in every direction, piercing the boundless horizon, without discovering a human being or a trace of man. Naked, solitary, unlimited space extends around, where man never breathes under the shade, or rests his limbs under the cover of a dwelling. A deep blue tint spreads along its surface, here and there shaded with a cast of brown; the distant outline of the horizon is clear and sharply defined; not an eminence rises to break the monotonous flat, and along the edge extends a large district covered with salt, distinguished from the rest by its peculiar colour. “There is something grand and awe-inspiring in its boundless immensity. Like the first view of the ocean, it inspires emotions, never before experienced, unearthly in appearance, and out of character with the general fair face of nature. The eye shrinks from contemplating the empty, cheerless solitude, and we turn away in quest of some object to remove the scenes of utter loneliness, that its gloomy aspect is calculated to inspire.” From these pages we turn with satisfaction to those of an American:—“I have stood before the Parthenon, and have almost worshipped that divine achievement of the immortal Phidias. I have been at Milan, at Ephesus, at Alexandria, at Antioch; but in none of these renowned cities I have beheld any thing, that I can allow to approach in united extent, grandeur, and most consummate beauty, this almost more than work of man. On each side of this, the central point, there rose upward slender pyramids—pointed obelisks—domes of the most graceful proportions, columns, arches, and lofty towers, for number and for form, beyond my power to describe. These buildings, as well as the walls of the city, being all either of white marble, or of some stone as white, and being everywhere in their whole extent interspersed, as I have already said, with multitudes of overshadowing palm trees, perfectly filled and satisfied my sense of beauty, and made me feel, for the moment, as if in such a scene I should love to dwell, and there end my days.” Burckhardt speaks thus of Palmyra and Balbec:—“Having seen the ruins of Tadmor, a comparison between these two renowned remains of antiquity naturally offered itself to my mind. The temple of the Sun at Tadmor, is upon a grander scale than that of Balbec, but it is choked with Arab houses, which admit only a view of the building in detail. The architecture of Balbec is richer than that of Tadmor.”