power whose monarch sat

``High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus or of Ind.''[1]


[1] Milton, ``Paradise Lost,'' Book II.

Persia was mightier still. Two thousand years before America
was heard of, while France and Germany, England and Spain,
were savage wildernesses, Persia was the abode of civilization
and culture, of learning and eloquence. Her empire extended
from the Indus to the Danube and from the Oxus to the Nile,
embracing twenty satrapies each one of whose governors was
well-nigh a king. Alexander the Great, too, at the head of
his invincible army, swept over vast areas of Asia, capturing
cities, unseating rulers, and bringing well-nigh all the civilized
world under his dominion. And was not Rome also an Asiatic
power, for it stretched not only from the firths of Scotland
on the north to the deserts of Africa on the south, but
from the Atlantic Ocean on the west to the River Euphrates on
the east.

Altogether it is a majestic but awful procession, overwhelming
us by its grandeur and yet no less by its horror. It is
a kaleidoscope on a colossal scale, whose pieces appear like
fragments of a broken universe. Empires rise and fall.
Thrones are erected and overturned. The mightiest creations
of man vanish. Yea, they have all waxed ``old as doth a garment,''
and ``as a vesture'' are they ``changed.''