In the first week of December they arrived at Dendera, where stands in majestic completeness one of the most ancient temples of Egypt. It has for thousands of years been half buried in the earth, and at one time must have been nearly hid by the shifting sands of the desert which once surrounded the pile. The impression which the gigantic columns, sixty feet high, and the enormous blocks of stone, eight feet thick, gave to them, is doubtless shared in some degree by all travellers. As he walked through the shadowy recesses, each aperture seeming like a deep cave in a rocky mountain, he was filled with a solemn sense of awe and sadness, which so overwhelmed him that he peered about the avenues in silence, and involuntarily stood on tip-toe. The sombre grandeur of the massive masonry, the sacred associations connected with the ancient worship of Osiris and Isis, the wonderful tales of wars, tyrannies, famines, plagues, Rameses, Moses, Pharaoh, Alexander, Ptolemy, Cambyses, and Napoleon, which those lofty statues could tell if their symmetrical lips could speak, awaken indescribable emotions, deep, thrilling, and permanent. Mr. Taylor saw a grace and an artistic merit in the stone figures, and in the hieroglyphics that adorned the temple, which few travellers detect or admit. To many travellers the figures on those old porches and halls seem rude and often out of proportion, and the writer confesses to having been one of the latter class. But Mr. Taylor’s appreciating scrutiny may be accounted for on the basis that with his poetical instincts and thorough culture in art, there were beauties in those works of ancient sculptors, latent to others, but apparent and striking to him. But there is no disagreement as to the unspeakable solemnity of the place and the gloom of its lonely halls.