After lunching in a shady spot we took an anything but shady ride to the temple-palace of Koorneh, and from thence to the Memnonium. Both are very interesting, but the latter by far the finest; there is about it a breadth and a vastness, together with much elegance and variety, that are very impressive. Nothing that I have seen is comparable to the monuments of Egypt, for the expression of gigantic thoughts and limitless command of material and labour; withal there is about them something stolid and oppressive that is unsatisfactory; and as I looked at these vast ruins, vivid memories of Athens and its Acropolis invaded me, and the Parthenon in all its serene splendour rose before my mind; mighty, too, in its measured sobriety, stately in the noble rhythm of its forms; infinitely precious in the added glory of its sculptures; lovable as a living thing; and then more, perhaps, than ever before, I felt what a divine breath informed that marvellous Attic people, and what an ineffaceable debt of gratitude is due to them from us, blind fumblers in their footsteps. I was less struck than I had expected to be by the two colossal statues, of one of which it was poetically fabled by the ancients that a mysterious clang rose from it as the first rays of the rising sun smote its forehead. The myth is more striking than the statues, though their size and isolation give them something impressive. I had expected them, too, I don't know why, to be in a desert, and they are in a field. How infinitely grander is the great Sphinx, with its strange, far-gazing, haunting eyes, fixed, for ever, on the East, as if expecting the dawn of a day that never comes; immovable, unchanging, without shadow of sorrow, or light of gladness, whilst the gladness of men has turned to sorrow and their thoughts to ashes before them, through three times a thousand years! Century by century the desert has been gathering and growing round it--the feet are buried, the body, the breast are hidden. How soon will the sealing sands give rest at last to those steadfast, expectant eyes?