Cleopatra's Needle. 'Look up! look up, I say, and feel small--very
small indeed! Did Christians raise them, or engrave them from base
to point with the wisdom of the ancients? Did Christians build that
Museum next to it, or design its statues and its frescoes--now,
alas! re-echoing no more to the hummings of the Attic bee? Did they
pile up out of the waves that palace beyond it, or that Exchange? or
fill that Temple of Neptune with breathing brass and blushing
marble? Did they build that Timonium on the point, where Antony,
worsted at Actium, forgot his shame in Cleopatra's arms? Did they
quarry out that island of Antirrhodus into a nest of docks, or cover
those waters with the sails of every nation under heaven? Speak!
Thou son of bats and moles--thou six feet of sand--thou mummy out of
the cliff caverns! Can monks do works like these?'

'Other men have laboured, and we have entered into their labours,'
answered Philammon, trying to seem as unconcerned as he could. He
was, indeed, too utterly astonished to be angry at anything. The
overwhelming vastness, multiplicity, and magnificence of the whole
scene; the range of buildings, such as mother earth never, perhaps,
carried on her lap before or since, the extraordinary variety of
form-the pure Doric and Ionic of the earlier Ptolemies, the barbaric
and confused gorgeousness of the later Roman, and here and there an
imitation of the grand elephantine style of old Egypt, its gaudy
colours relieving, while they deepened, the effect of its massive
and simple outlines; the eternal repose of that great belt of stone
contrasting with the restless ripple of the glittering harbour, and
the busy sails which crowded out into the sea beyond, like white
doves taking their flight into boundless space?--all dazzled,
overpowered, saddened him .... This was the world .... Was it not
beautiful? .... Must not the men who made all this have been--if