EGYPT! My first-born and consort of the Nile!--while thy Pyramids and Temples shall remain--and they will even to the final tempest of the World--thou shalt be identified from among all the nations of the Earth! ATHENS!--My favourite daughter! Until the Rock of the Acropolis shall fall,--thy classic beauties,--around which have gleamed the meridian splendour of the mind, will proclaim that Minerva, Plato, Pericles, and Phidias, were thy own! PALMYRA!--My third joy! Although the wild Arab sleeps within thy roofless dwelling, with the whirling sands for his nightly mantle--yet, while thy Porticoes, Arches, and Colonnades shall be seen, the City of the Desert will live in Memory; for the Spirits of Longinus and Zenobia will be there! ROME!--My Warrior Son! Thy ancient glory lives in the recorded evidences of thy Parent's Art; for amid the ruined columns of thy Forum glide the spectral forms of Romulus, Junius, Virginius, Brutus, Cato, and of Cicero! Through thy Arches move those of Septimus, Vespasian, Titus, and of Constantine!--And dost thou not speak to all the world from the solemn historic voice of thy giant Coliseum? But beyond all this, from the ashes of thy former magnificence--like the Phœnix upon the spot of Martyrdom, thou hast risen in double splendour to the Glory of THE SAVIOUR and the Faith of an Apostle; and to the triple-fame of Bramante, Raphael, and Angelo! These are the still-living metropolitan records of by-gone days--from the Heathen to the Christian--they cannot be rejected--from them we trace and prove the æras of the world. Sculpture has also her own prerogative, apart and separate from her Lord, as a dower-right, a jointure power of instruction; and what immortal pupils has she not produced? They stand as the models of art and intellect--each unapproached--solitary and beautiful,--the human eye contemplates them with the chaste wonder of Creation's daughter--Eve, when from the banks of Eden's limpid waters, she first gazed upon the mirrored image of herself! The Jupiter of Elias,--the Minerva and the Triple-Fates of the Parthenon,--the Medicean Venus and her sister of the Bath,--the gentle Antinöus,--the Athenian Phocian,--The Pythonian Victor--Sun-clad Apollo,--the Serpent-strangled Priest and Sons of Troy, all speak the intellectual power of their mistress: and even the poor Roman captive--the death-struck Gladiator--has been raised by her magic wand from the sandy deathbed of the Coliseum, to live on, unconquered to all posterity!