In the earlier stages of society, the isolated rock--the mountain, cloud-encircled--the river, rolling to its ocean-home--the very stars themselves--were endued with sympathies, and constituted the first, as they will be the last, witnesses and records of our human destinies and feelings. The glories of the Parthenon shall fade into oblivion; but while the heights of Thermopylæ stand, and while a wave murmurs in the gulph of Salamis, a voice shall cry aloud to the universe--"Freedom and glory to those who can dare to die!--woe and everlasting infamy to him who would enthral the unconquerable spirit!" The Coliseum with its sanguinary trophies is crumbling to decay; but the islet of Nisida, where Brutus parted with his Portia--the steep of Leucadia, still remain fixed as the foundations of the earth; and lasting as the round world itself shall be the memories that hover over them! As long as the waters of the Hellespont flow between Sestos and Abydos, the fame of the love that perished there shall never pass away. A traveller, pursuing his weary way through the midst of an African desert--a barren, desolate, and almost boundless solitude--found a gigantic sculptured head, shattered and half-buried in the sand; and near it the fragment of a pedestal, on which these words might be with pain deciphered: "_I am Ozymandias, King of kings; look upon my works, ye mighty ones, and despair!_" Who was Ozymandias?--where are now his works?--what bond of thought or feeling, links his past with our present? The Arab, with his beasts of burthen, tramples unheeding over these forlorn vestiges of human art and human grandeur. In the wildest part of the New Continent, hidden amid the depths of interminable forests, there stands a huge rock, hallowed by a tradition so recent that the man is not yet gray-headed who was born its contemporary; but that rock, and the tale which consecrates it, shall carry down to future ages a deep lesson--a moral interest lasting as itself--however the aspect of things and the conditions of people change around it. Henceforth no man shall gaze on it with careless eye; but each shall whisper to his own bosom--"What is stronger than love in a mother's heart?--what more fearful than power wielded by ignorance?--or what more lamentable than the abuse of a beneficent name to purposes of selfish cruelty?"