Of the Temple of Jupiter, however, only six standing columns remain; of the Temple of Bacchus only the god and the Bacchantes are missing. And why was the one destroyed, the other preserved, only the six columns, had they a tongue, could tell. Indeed, how many blustering vandals have _they_ conquered, how many savage attacks have they resisted, what wonders and what orgies have they beheld! These six giants of antiquity, looking over Anti-Lebanon in the East, and down upon the meandering Leontes in the South, and across the Syrian steppes in the North, still hold their own against Time and the Elements. They are the dominating feature of the ruins; they tower above them as the Acropolis towers above the surrounding poplars. And around their base, and through the fissures, flows the perennial grace of the seasons. The sun pays tribute to them in gold; the rain, in mosses and ferns; the Spring, in lupine flowers. And the swallows, nesting in the portico of the Temple of Bacchus, above the curious frieze of egg-decoration,--as curious, too, _their_ art of egg-making,--pour around the colossal columns their silvery notes. Surely, these swallows and ferns and lupine flowers are more ancient than the Acropolis. And the marvels of extinct nations can not hold a candle to the marvels of Nature. Here, under the decaying beauty of Roman art, lies buried the monumental boldness of the Phoenicians, or of a race of giants whose extinction even Homer deplores, and whose name even the Phoenicians could not decipher. For might they not, too, have stood here wondering, guessing, even as we moderns guess and wonder? Might not the Phoenicians have asked the same questions that we ask to-day: Who were the builders? and with what tools? In one of the walls of the Acropolis are stones which a hundred bricklayers can not raise an inch from the ground; and among the ruins of the Temple of Zeus are porphyry pillars, monoliths, which fifty horses could barely move, and the quarry of which is beyond the Syrian desert. There, now, solve the problem for yourself. Hidden in the grove of silver-tufted poplars is the little Temple of Venus, doomed to keep company with a Mosque. But it is a joy to stand on the bridge above the stream that flows between them, and listen to the muazzen in the minaret and the bulbuls in the Temple. Mohammad calling to Venus, Venus calling to Mohammad--what a romance! We leave the subject to the poet that wants it. Another Laus Veneris to another Swinburne might suggest itself.