Enchanted with the whole scene, I lingered on my voyage, visiting all those luxurious and venerable places, whose names have been consecrated by the wonder of ages. At Saïs I was present during her Festival of Lamps, and read, by the blaze of innumerable lights, those sublime words on the temple of Neitha: “I am all that has been, that is, and that will be, and no man hath ever lifted my veil.” I wandered among the prostrate obelisks of Heliopolis, and saw, not without a sigh, the sun smiling over her ruins, as if in mockery of the mass of perishable grandeur, that had once called itself, in its pride, “The City of the Sun.” But to the Isle of the Golden Venus was my fondest pilgrimage;—and as I explored its shades, where bowers are the only temples, I felt how far more fit to form the shrine of a Deity are the ever‐living stems of the garden and the grove, than the most precious columns that the inanimate quarry can supply. Every where new pleasures, new interests awaited me; and though Melancholy, as usual, stood always near, her shadow fell but half‐way over my vagrant path, and left the rest more welcomely brilliant from the contrast. To relate my various adventures, during this short voyage, would only detain me from events, far, far more worthy of record. Amidst such endless variety of attractions, the great object of my journey was forgotten;—the mysteries of this land of the sun were, to me, as much mysteries as ever, and I had as yet been initiated in nothing but its pleasures. It was not till that evening, when I first stood before the Pyramids of Memphis, and saw them towering aloft, like the watch‐towers of Time, from whose summit, when he expires, he will look his last,—it was not till this moment that the great secret, of which I had dreamed, again rose, in all its inscrutable darkness, upon my thoughts. There was a solemnity in the sunshine that rested upon those monuments—a stillness, as of reverence, in the air around them, that stole, like the music of past times, into my heart. I thought what myriads of the wise, the beautiful, and the brave, had sunk into dust since earth first beheld those wonders; and, in the sadness of my soul, I exclaimed,—“Must man alone, then, perish? must minds and hearts be annihilated, while pyramids endure? Death, Death, even on these everlasting tablets,—the only approach to immortality that kings themselves could purchase,—thou hast written our doom, saying, awfully and intelligibly, ‘There is, for man, no eternal mansion, but the tomb!’”