that indicated there was no mode of making the
past the present. What had become of the pleasant
faces, the cheerful voices, the animal spirits, which
seemed in my eyes to give a soul to those splendid
donations of our forefathers to learning in years gone
by? That instinct--soul, spirit, whatever it be--which
animates and vivifies everything, and without which the
palace is not comparable to the hovel possessing it,--
that instinct or spirit was absent for me, at least. At
length I adjourned to the Star, somewhat moody, more
than half wishing I had not entered the city. I ordered
my solitary meal, and began ruminating, as we all do,
over the thousandth-time told tale of human destiny by
generation after generation. I am not sure I did not
greet with sullen pleasure a heavy, dark, dense mass of
cloud that at that moment canopied the city. The
mind finds all kinds of congenialities grateful at such
moments. Some drops of rain fell; then a shower,
tolerably heavy. I could not go out again as I intended
doing. I sat and sipped my wine, thinking of the fate
of cities,--of Nineveh the renowned, of the marbles
lately recovered from thence with the mysterious arrowheaded
characters. I thought that some future Layard
might exhume the cornices of the Oxford temples. The
deaths of cities were as inevitable as those of men. I
felt that my missing friends had only a priority in
mortality, and that the law of the Supreme existed to
be obeyed without man's questionings.

But a sun-burst took place, the shower ceased, all